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LONDON — WILLIAM HEINEMANN 



1918 




Photo: Daily Mail' 



" GETTING TOGETHER " 

Stars and Stripes and Union 
Jack about to be hoisted from 
the same flagstaff over the 
British Houses of Parliament, 

April, 1917. 



l£3 



EXPLAINING THE 

BRITISHERS 



EXPLAINING THE 

BRITISHERS 



BY 



FREDERIC WILLIAM WILE 

Author of "Men Around the Kaiser," 
"The Assault," etc. 



The Story of the British Empire's Mighty 
Effort in Liberty's Cause 



Written by AN AMERICAN for 
AMERICAN SOLDIERS and SAILORS 




LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN 
Autumn 1918 



%■ 



*Sk 



To 

My Fellow- Yanks 

Who are Streaming into Europe 

For the Worthy Purpose 

of 

Kanning the Kaiser 

This Booklet is Affectionately 

Dedicated 



By Transfer 

MAY 6 1913 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 

i. England and America -- A Bit of 
Modern History 

II. "Playing the Game" 

III. The British Navy... 

IV. The British Army... 
V. The Home Army ... 

VI. Ireland and the Colonies 

VII. How the Britishers are Governed 

VI II. The Bulldog Breed 
IX. The Real Britisher 



PA«E 

7 


)F 

11 


21 


30 


43 


.. 55 


• 


67 


81 


94 


.. 109 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Facing 
Page 

" Getting Together " — The Stars and Stripes 
AND THE UNION Jack Frontispiece 

The Old " Mayflower " House, Plymouth ... 17 

The Fourth of July Baseball Game in London 32 

In the Rooters' Section ... 33 

Tommy Atkins— " 'Arf a Mo', Kaiser!" ... 48 

Royal Review of American Troops at 

Buckingham Palace 64 

King George's Glad Hand to the Yanks ... 80 

The King of England Decorating Yanks in 

France 96 

The " Washington Inn " Hostel for American 

Officers in London ... . 112 

The "Eagle Hut " for Yanks in London ... 113 



INTRODUCTION . 

J ET me introduce myself. I am one of you. I 
am a Hoosier, born and bred. My home town 
is the metropolis of Northern Indiana. Its name is 
La Porte. It nestles among the maple trees and the 
rolling prairies in the north-western corner of the State, 
ten or twelve miles from where Lake Michigan laps 
over the border on its way to Chicago. 

George Ade, who also had the honor of being 
born in Indiana, once said that the brighter an Indiana 
boy is the quicker he leaves, so, after attending the 
University of Notre Dame, at South Bend, I emigrated 
to Chicago and went into newspaper work- I n 1900 
the " Chicago Daily News " sent me to London to 
help report the Boer War and a couple of years later 
I was appointed as its resident correspondent in Berlin. 



8 Introduction 



I lived in Germany for nearly thirteen years preceding 
the present war — most of the time as the Berlin repre- 
sentative of Lord Northcliffe's London " Daily Mail." 
It was in that capacity that I was arrested by the 
Kaiser's police on the night of August 4, 1914, on the 
charge of being "a British spy." Thanks to our live- 
wire Ambassador, the Honorable James W. Gerard, 
I was released and permitted to leave Germany with 
the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen. Since 
then, with a couple of trips home in between, I have 
been living and working in England. 

That is my excuse for writing this little book- I 
have seen John Bull " going to it." I have been able 
to observe at close range his slow but sure prepara- 
tions to deliver his mighty punch. It is a wonderful 
story. My one regret is that I lack the skill to tell it 
in the terms it deserves. But I want, if I can, to 
acquaint you with some of the outstanding facts and 
figures in order that you may have a general idea of 
the tremendous effort which the Britishers — and by 
the Britishers I mean the whole British Empire, here 



Introduction 



and oversea — have put forth in the cause to which we 
of the United States have now pledged " all we have 
and everything we are." 



F. W. W. 



168, Coleherne Court, S.W., 

London, September, 1918. 



ENGLAND 

I SEE her not dispirited, not weak, but well 
remembering that she has seen dark days 
before ; indeed, with a kind of instinct that she 
sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that in 
storm of battle and calamity she has a secret 
vigor and a pulse like cannon. I see her in 
her old age, not decrepit, but young, and still 
daring to believe in her power of endurance and 
expansion. Seeing this, I say, All hail ! Mother 
of nations, Mother of heroes, with strength still 
equal to the time ; still wise to entertain and 
swift to execute the policy which the mind and 
heart of mankind require at the present hour, 
and thus only hospitable to the foreigner, and 
truly a home to the thoughtful and generous, 
who are born in the soil. 

EMERSON (1856). 



EXPLAINING THE BRITISHERS 



Chapter I. 

ENGLAND AND AMERICA— A BIT OF 
MODERN HISTORY. 

HOW many of you fellows, I wonder, landed on 
the shores of England with the same ideas 
about her that I had when I first came? Two things 
were uppermost in my thoughts — first, that we once 
licked her in order to win our independence, and, 
secondly, that every Englishman hated us as the 
Devil hates holy water. I arrived in England 
with a chip on my shoulder, and I expected to have 
it knocked off. With my primary-school United States 
history deep and patriotically ingrained in me, I felt 
sure that I had come to a country with which America 
was no longer at war but which was our * ' enemy 
all the same. 

Now I venture to think that each and every 
one of you has been here just long enough to 
realize that our boyhood-schoolday notions about 
England are woefully out of date. I do not mean 



12 Explaining the Britishers 

that we should forsake George Washington and the 
Fourth of July and all the glorious traditions that 
enshrine them in our hearts. They are immortally 
dear to us. I do not mean that we should forget 
about that King of England, George III., against 
whom the American Colonies rebelled, or Lord North, 
his Prime Minister, on whose misguided counsel he 
acted, I do not mean that we should erase from our 
memories the fundamental fact that the Americans 
arranged the Boston Tea Party in 1773 because they 
objected to Taxation Without Representation. I do 
not mean that Bunker Hill and Brandy wine, Ticon- 
deroga and Valley Forge, Yorktown, Lafayette and 
Rochambeau are names that American boys should 
no longer mention. All these things are precious to 
us, for they are the concrete upon which our sky- 
scraper Republic is firmly imbedded. 

But the Declaration of Independence is a vener- 
able document. John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, 
Thomas Jefferson and our other sainted national 
heroes signed it 142 years ago. Five generations 
of Americans have come and gone since 1776, 
and as many generations of English men and women 
have been making history in the seven score years 
and two that have intervened. The England of to- 
day — the England in which you have arrived on the 
final stage of your trip to the battlefield — is no more 
the England of George III. and Lord North than our 
own United States is the America of the eighteenth 
century. An Englishman who held about us in 1918 
the Tory notions of 1750-1780 would be just as 



A Bit oj Modern History 13 

ludicrous a figure as an Englishman in satin knicker- 
bockers, powdered wig and a cocked hat. He would 
be a joke. He would not dare to show himself in 
public. He would be laughed to scorn. The times 
have changed. 

I have never looked through an English 
primary-school history book to see what English 
boys and girls are taught about the American 
War of Independence. I don't suppose they get a 
great deal of it — indeed there is far too little taught 
in England, even in the great Universities, about the 
United States and United States institutions'. The 
war ought to, and probably will, remedy that 
state of affairs. 

One of the results of our comradeship-in-arms 
with the Britishers in this war ought to be a new 
American school history of the War of Independence. 
Such a history, as I have already suggested, need not 
and should not omit the vital fact that the Colonies 
rebelled in a just cause and won an independence to 
which they were entitled. But such a history ought 
also to teach that England's leading statesmen were 
on America's side; that George III. and his official 
advisers were acting against the views of large sec- 
tions of the British people ; that these views could not 
be enforced because only 200,000 Britishers out of a 
population of 8,000,000 had a vote ; that several British 
generals resigned their commissions rather than fight 
against the American Colonists; that George III. had 
to adopt the expedient of hiring 30,000 German 
mercenaries (Hessians) to fight for him in America ; 



14 Explaining the Britishers 

that Pitt, Fox and Burke, the three outstanding 
political leaders of the day, all opposed George III.'s 
obstinate policy toward the Americans, and that Pitt 
(later Lord Chatham) withdrew his own sons from 
the Regular Army in order that they might not have 
to fight against the Colonies. These are historical 
facts. As American schoolboys, you and I did not 
get them, except in rare instances. That is why, to a 
large extent, we were brought up and grew up on 
anti-British dope, 

I have mixed with, lived among and worked for 
Englishmen for twelve years. It has been my 
privilege to know cooks' sons and Dukes' sons, as 
they say hereabouts, and even a Duke or two, and 
I have enjoyed friendly contact, without feeling the 
need of wearing smoked glasses, with "Sirs" and 
Lords of. high degree. I am acquainted with all sorts 
and conditions of English folk, from commoners to 
nobles. I belong to their clubs, I eat at their 
tables, I am the recipient of their confidences, and 
they receive my own in a spirit of patience and 
generosity. On the evidence of my own observations 
— and my professional occupation has made them 
intimate to a degree far beyond the opportunities 
enjoyed by the average American resident in the 
British Isles — I say without hesitation that no 
Englishman whose opinion is worth a tinker's 
cuss has anything to-day except boundless con- 
tempt for the policies which tore the American 
Colonies from the British Crown a century and a half 
ago. He is ashamed of them. He pities the short- 



A Bit of Modern History 15 

sightedness of the statesmen who . carried them out 
to England's eternal disadvantage. He will tell you, 
as hundreds of Englishmen have told me, that a 
George III. who tried in this age and day to govern 
British Colonies as our Original Thirteen were 
governed would wake up one fine morning — as an 
Irishman might put it — and find himself beheaded. 
That is what Englishmen of at least one era did with a 
King who, in their opinion, was not running his job 
properly. Some day, perhaps, you will come to 
London on leave. In Whitehall, the famous street 
on which the great Government offices stand, you will 
see a grey old building, celebrated as the scene of the 
execution of Charles I. He was the monarch who 
played fast and loose with the liberties of the people 
and lost his head for it. 

The plain fact of the matter is that present-day 
Englishmen — the kind who are giving you the glad 
hand at this very hour, wherever you are — disavow 
the policy that ."' lost America to England " because 
they love Liberty just as much as we Americans do. 
And — this is something you may not fully com- 
prehend — they have just as much Liberty as We have, 
in every respect. They are in the war because 
they want to retain their Liberty — as we do. England 
is a Republic with a King instead of a President. 
That is the difference between our respective forms 
of Government in a nutshell. The English have 
an hereditary instead of an elected Ruler. They 
respect and venerate their monarch just as we respect 
and venerate our Presidents. They stand at the 



16 Explaining the Britishers 

salute when " God Save the King " is sung or 
played because the King is the accepted guardian, 
protector and embodiment of English Liberties. His 
crown — which he only wears, by the way, once or 
twice a year for some traditional ceremonial at 
Court or in Parliament — is not a symbol of despotic 
power like the crown that the Kaiser wears. It is the 
emblem of the majesty of British freedom, of 
which the reigning Sovereign is the figurehead. 
That is the long and short of "the King business" in 
England. When the occupant of the throne happens 
to be a regular fellow like King George — a real 
he-man, a good sportsman, Democratic to the core, 
a hard worker, and a 100 per cent, gentleman — "the 
King business" is safe and sound. We prefer a 
President because, as the boy who had red hair said, 
we were born that way. But the liberty-loving English 
are perfectly satisfied with their system of a President 
who is called a King. 

Get that, and you will understand why the English 
and ourselves are now fighting shoulder to shoulder 
to destroy Autocracy. We are fellow-Democrats. 
Both of us believe, as Abraham Lincoln believed, 
that the only just Government is Government of the 
people, by the people, and for the people. England 
has been fighting for four years, and will go on 
fighting for forty more, if necessary, in order that 
Government of that sort shall not (in Lincoln's words 
at Gettysburg) " perish from the face of the earth." 

I guess we are all agreed that a friend in need is 
a friend indeed. England, in your life-time and mine. 




THE OLD " MAYFLOWER" 
HOUSE, PLYMOUTH. 

Where the Pilgrim Fathers set 
out for America in 1620. 



From a drawing by 
Muirhead Bone 



A Bit of Modern History 17 

proved herself to be precisely that kind of a friend of 
the United States. I refer to the Spanish- American 
War. Nearly all of you boys were babes in arms in 
1898, or at least kids. So it may be new to many 
of you that England played an important part in our 
short and snappy conflict with the Spaniards. You 
all know who Admiral George Dewey was — the man 
whom President McKinley sent to the Philippine 
Islands with instructions to destroy the Spanish Fleet. 
He made a clean job of it bright and early on the 
morning of May 1 , and, after sending Admiral 
Montojos squadron to the bottom, Dewey established 
a blockade of Manila Bay. Besides the victorious 
American fleet, there were two other squadrons in 
Philippine waters — a British squadron, commanded by 
Admiral Chichester, and a German squadron, com- 
manded by A.dmiral von Diederichs. The British, 
with centuries of naval traditions and experience, 
respected Admiral Dewey's blockade unqualifiedly. 
The Germans, being people who butt in where angels 
fear to tread, were surly. They questioned Dewey's 
rights and set up some chesty pretensions of their own. 
Courteous protests by Dewey having failed to con- 
vince the Germans that he meant business when he 
told them that he was boss in the Bay and intended 
to remain so, the American Admiral trained his guns 
on the German Fleet. Then he notified Admiral von 
Diederichs that the guns would go off if the Germans 
continued to be ugly. This made von Diederichs sit 
up. He sent his flag- lieutenant (von Hintze, who is 
now the German Minister of Foreign Affairs) to talk 



18 Explaining the Britishers 

matters over with Dewey and the British. Admiral. 
Dewey's reply was straight to the point. Tell 

your Admiral," lie said, " that if Germany wants 
war with the United States, she can have it in 
five minutes ! " 

The interview which von Diederichs' flag-lieutenant 
had with Admiral Chichester, the British commander, 
was also very pointed. " I have come to you," said 
von Hintze, " to ask what the British squadron will 
do in case there is trouble between the Germans and 
the Americans." 

' Tell Admiral von Diederichs, with my compli- 
ments," replied Chichester, " that that is a matter 
known only to Admiral Dewey and myself." 

It was not long after that, to Admiral von 
Diederichs* astonishment, that the British squadron 
manoeuvred into a position that would have brought 
the German ships, had they dared to fire a shot, in 
conflict not only with the American squadron but with 
the British as well. Diederichs gave Dewey no more 
trouble after that. 

That was the first, but not the last, great proof of 
friendship which England gave us during the Spanish- 
American war. The Dewey-Diederichs episode 
angered the Kaiser and his fellow War Lords in 
Germany beyond words. They had just launched 
their own great Naval programme, and nothing would 
have proved more useful for their purposes than a 
victory, bloodless or otherwise, over the ** arrogant 
Yankees " in Manila Bay. The Kaiser swore to be 
revenged for the " insult " Dewey had put upon the 



A Bit of Modern History 19 

German Admiral. He vowed that by hook or by 
crook Spain must be spared the ignominy of defeat by 
the United States. He decided to form a league 
of European Governments, which should go to the 
American Government and say that they did not 
propose to let "the upstart of the Western world" 
crush an ancient and proud European nation. The 
German Ambassador at Washington, Baron von 
Holleben, laid the Kaiser's scheme before the British 
Ambassador, Sir Julian Pauncefote. It got no further. 
England put her big foot down, and once again 
Germany's plot to embarrass and humiliate Uncle 
Sam was kiboshed. The German Fleet was nearly 
as strong as ours in 1898, if not stronger, but the 
Kaiser knew that if he dared to interfere in the settle- 
ment of our quarrel with Spain, Germany would 
probably have to reckon with the British Navy, too. 
So he didn't burn his fingers. 

The Government archives at Washington contain 
plenty of evidence that England and the United States 
have marched shoulder to shoulder, as friends and 
mutual well-wishers,, on numerous other occasions. 
But as fighting-men I think the Philippines episode, 
and what followed, will make the strongest appeal to 
you. For my own part, I have always thought that if 
John Bull had never done anything else to deserve our 
help when he was in a tight corner, his action at 
Manila in May, 1898, was enough to entitle England 
to our undying gratitude. 

In the opening- chapter of this story it has merely 
been my aim to refresh your memories on modern 



20 Explaining the Britishers 

Anglo-American history. And now I want to tell you, 
as best as I can, how Mother Britain rolled up her 
sleeves in August, 1914 — slowly, as is her way — but 
gritting her teeth more resolutely all the time, until 
to-day she stands forth a giantess in arms, her world- 
wide territories uninvaded, her flag supreme on the 
high seas, and all her hundreds of millions of people, 
white and black, united in one fierce, firm determina- 
tion — to "carry on" till victory, complete and final, 
is achieved. 



Chapter II. 
"PLAYING THE GAME." 

CRICKET is England's national game. It is to 
her what baseball is to us. Every English kid 
grows up on cricket, just as you and I were raised 
on baseball. Though there are professional cricketers, 
cricket has always been an essentially amateur, or 
"gentleman's," game. English boys have their great 
cricket heroes like C. B. Fry just as we have our 
Ty Cobbs. To be the best bowler at your school, 
college or university in England, or to play for your 
county, is to win one of the finest honors you can 
possibly achieve. The distinction is more than likely 
to cling to you through life. It may be mentioned 
in "Who's Who," and perhaps help you to get 
elected to Parliament — provided, first and always, 
that you have "played the game." 

It is with that feature of cricket — " playing the 
game," which means playing it not only well but 
honorably, fairly and squarely, all the time — that I 
want to deal, briefly. It means everything in England. 
It means so much that when a man doesn't deal 
honestly with his fellow-men, or stoops to anything 
low or underhanded, people say, " It isn't cricket." 
He has not "played the game." Baseball became 
immensely popular in England this year, thanks 
to the presence of so many American soldiers and 
sailors on British soil. But it will never take the 



22 Explaining the Britishers 

place of cricket in Englishmen's affections. It can 
no more do that than the American temperament 
can be grafted onto the English character. Cricket 
is English temperament and character in com- 
posite. To our way of thinking, of course, the game 
isn't in the same street with baseball. I never met 
a Yankee who could keep awake during a whole 
cricket game, which isn't so surprising, seeing that 
a real cricket match can last three whole days; and 
Englishmen have fallen asleep even at a World's 
Championship match between the Giants and the 
White Sox. Cricket to us is slow, old-fashioned 
and unexciting. Baseball, in Englishmen's eyes, is 
noisy, nerve-wracking and upsetting. In the fact that 
cricket is deliberate and baseball spontaneous, we 
get, in my opinion, very close to the main difference 
between the English and American make-ups. 

I took an English friend to the Army and Navy 
baseball game in London on the Fourth of July, when 
the King and Queen and other Royal personages were 
present. I wanted to convert my friend from cricket 
to baseball. I wanted to show him what a real out- 
door game was like — where victory goes to the 
team that thinks fastest, acts quickest, and is 
up on its toes and moving every second of the 
time. It was a red-hot contest and as it progressed 
I rejoiced that my English friend was seeing such a 
splendid exhibition. The pitching was superfine, a 
lot of men were struck out, the base-running and 
fielding were almost perfect, and the Army nearly 
tied the score in the last inning — if they had, I would 



"Playing the Game" 23 

have been five plunks to the good ! At any rate, it 
was a hair-raising finish . Although my English com- 
rade had not yelled himself hoarse, or joined with me 
in abusing the umpire, or "stretched " at the seventh, 
1 felt pretty sure he had been deeply impressed. 1 
couldn't wait for him to volunteer his joy, so, while 
walking home, I tried to extort it. You have to pry 
enthusiasm out of an Englishman with a jimmy. 

" Baseball is very exciting and requires skilful 
playing — I can see that," he said. "But I prefer 
cricket. It is better suited to the English nature. We 
could never learn to play baseball well because we 
are not made for it. It is too impulsive. It requires 
things to be done in too much of a hurry. There 
is no time to think them over. And then, you see, 
cricket means much more to us than just two or 
three hours' sport in the open air. It is our way of 
building and training character. Wellington, who 
defeated Napoleon, said that Waterloo was won on 
the playing-fields of Eton — our famous preparatory 
school. Do you know what Wellington meant by 
that? He meant that the tenacity, the sticking-to-it, 
the honorable fighting, the never-say-die spirit, that 
enabled the British Army at Waterloo to conquer, 
were the fruits of the lessons the lads of England learn 
on the cricket-field. They learn there to ' play the 
game,' calmly, coolly, unexcitedly. They are taught 
to play hardest when the luck seems to be running 
against them the most. ' Play up, and play the game,' 
runs one of our school-boy recitations, as familiar to 
English youths as 'Paul Revere's Ride,' or 'The 



24 Explaining the Britishers 

Village Blacksmith,' or 'Barbara Frietchie ' is to 
American boys. 

" No," continued my English pal, " we'll stick 
to cricket. It is slow and methodical and old- 
fashioned. The rules are very strict and never 
changed for the purpose of speeding up the game or 
making it more thrilling. We play it as our grand- 
fathers played it because it inculcates in us the con- 
servatism and caution which, we like to think, are 
the bedrock on which the British Empire has been 
built up. Cricket shows us how to ' play the game ' 
— how to rejoice reasonably when we win, how to 
take defeat and punishment without whimpering 
when we lose." 

I have told you all this not for the purpose of 
weaning you from baseball to cricket — it would be a 
national calamity if the United States Army and Navy 
went home and turned their back on baseball. I just 
want to make you understand, if I can, how cricket, 
as the chief athletic pursuit of Young England, 
inspired the Britishers to " play the game " in August, 
1914, when the British Empire and Civilization in 
general were confronted by the supreme crisis in 
human history. The German propaganda in the 
United States tried to make us believe that England 
declared war on Germany because John Bull was 
jealous of Germany's trade successes in the markets 
of the world. Even the Germans know now that that 
was a lie. They have heard from the Kaiser's own 
Ambassador in London, Prince Lichnowsky, that the 
British Government worked tooth and nail till the 



"Playing the Game" 25 

last minute to preserve peace. England proposed to 
settle the quarrel between Austria, Serbia and Russia 
by arbitration. But the Kaiser was all dressed up and 
had nowhere to go. So he went to war. 

England went to war because her name was 
signed to a treaty which guaranteed the neutrality of 
Belgium. When you keep to your treaty obligations 
— when you look upon a solemn international agree- 
ment as a bond of honor and not as a " scrap of 
paper " — you play the game. It would not be 
" cricket " to do anything else. So Sir Edward Grey 
and Mr. Lloyd George and the other statesmen who 
were at the helm of British affairs in August, 1914, 
remembered the first maxim of life which cricket 
teaches to Englishmen — to stick to the rules, to 
fight when an honorable cause requires you to 
fight, and to keep on fighting, hard but cleanly, till 
you have the other fellow underneath or are knocked 
out yourself. England did not rush into war. She 
thought it over a long time — so long that right up to 
the eleventh hour there was still considerable doubt 
whether she would " go in." Cricket, you see, taught 
her statesmen the importance of never going off half- 
cocked. But when they had weighed all the pros and 
cons of the situation — slowly, deliberately, thoroughly 
— Old England took the leap, for better or for worse. 
She decided to play the game. She determined to 
avenge Germany's violation of Belgium. It was 
" cricket." 

The British Navy, of course, was ready. If it 
hadn't been, you and I might not be here to-day — 



26 Explaining the Britishers 

you to read, or I to tell, the story. But England's 
decision to fight — to help France, to protect Belgium 
—meant that she had to go up against not only the 
Naval forces of Germany, but to jump in on land and 
face the mightiest Military Power that then existed 
anywhere in the world. England as a factor in a 
land war in which armies of millions were already 
engaged looked like a flea-bite. No wonder that the 
Kaiser spoke of "the contemptible little British 
army." Germany had anywhere from 4,000,000 to 
6,000,000 trained soldiers to call upon. England had 
ready for fighting over seas about 4 per cent of the 
number of troops already mobilized in Germany. 
Yet on August 1 7, less than two weeks after England 
made up her mind to play the game, the " First Seven 
Divisions " had arrived in France, fully equipped with 
horses, guns, ammunition and all the other vast 
trappings of an Expeditionary Force. It was a record 
in transport which was never approached even in our 
own land of Hustle. A week later the British Army 
was in battle position before the German hordes at 
Mons, in Belgium, fiercely engaged in a struggle 
to stem the progress of overwhelmingly superior 
forces. 

Here and there in England to-day you will en- 
counter Tommies and officers who wear a rainbow- 
like strip of ribbon on their breasts. It is a simple 
combination of red, white and blue, fading one into 
another. Tommy Atkins calls it the " Go -bli-me " 
ribbon — the Cockney for a swear-phrase which 
in plain English says, " God blind me." 



"Playing the Game" 27 

Every time I pass a man adorned with the Mons 
Ribbon — for that is what the " Go'-bli'-me " strip 
is officially called — I feel like taking off my hat to 
him. For the British Expeditionary Force at Mons 
faced as ferocious an onslaught as any army in the 
annals of war ever stood up against. The Kaiser had 
ordered "the British Contemptibles " to be wiped off 
the face of the earth. Two full German Army Corps 
and two Cavalry Divisions were hurled against the 
troops of General Sir John French. The terrific battle 
grew in fury and bloodiness from minute to minute. 
Within twenty-four hours of taking the field, the 
British were locked in a grapple for life or death 
with the crack regiments of the most highly- 
trained army in Europe. The British did not 
yield. They played the game. They took frightful 
punishment, giving it, too, in such kind as their 
inferior numbers permitted, but on the third day of 
the battle, so magnificent had been their resistance, 
the Germans threw in three more Army Corps, 
making five altogether, besides a reserve corps. With 
these tremendous odds against them, sole salvation 
for the British lay in retreat, and, fighting tenaciously, 
General French decided to extricate what was left 
of his little Army. The fields around Mons were 
by this time richly drenched with the best blood of 
England, for the losses of the " Contemptibles " 
were cruelly heavy. It was due to nothing but the 
superhuman heroism of General French's remaining 
forces that they were not crushed by the masses of 
Germans hurled against them. It became known 



28 Explaining the Britishers 

afterwards that the Kaiser's legions practically 
staked their all on wiping out the British Army. So 
the escape of its gallant remnant from Mons was a 
military feat of skill and glory. 

Thus before the great war for Liberty was a month 
old England lived up splendidly to its century- 
old tradition of playing the game. Without any 
obligation, save the greatest and most sacred of all 
— that of honor and of loyalty to friends in need — 
England not only flung all she had into the furnace 
of war, but prepared forthwith to fling more and more, 
and if need be all she had, into its consuming fires. 
Every man and every gun lost at Mons was replaced 
practically while the retreat was still in progress. 

In the knapsack of each soldier who now went 
forward to the fray was a message from Lord 
Kitchener, the new Minister of War, with instructions 
that it should be kept in the active-service pay-book. 
The message was as follows : 

You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the 
King to help our French comrades against the 
invasion of a common enemy. You have to per- 
form a task which will need your courage, your 
energy, your patience. Remember that the 
honor of the British Army depends on your 
individual conduct. 

" It will be your duty not only to set an 
example of discipline and perfect steadiness 
under fire, but also to maintain the most friendly 
relations with those whom you are helping in 



'Playing the Game" 29 



the struggle. The operations in which you are 
engaged will, for the most part, take place in a 
friendly country, and you can do your own 
country no better service than in showing your- 
self in France and Belgium in the true character 
of a British soldier. 

" Be invariably courteous, considerate, and 
kind. Never do anything likely to injure or 
destroy property, and always look upon looting 
as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet with 
a welcome and to be trusted. Your conduct must 
justify that welcome and that trust. 

"Your duty cannot be done unless your health 
is sound. So keep constantly on your guard 
against any excesses. In this new experience 
you may find temptations in both wine and 
women. You must entirely resist both tempta- 
tions, and while treating all women with perfect 
courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy. 

" Do your duty bravely, 

" Fear God, 

" Honor the King.'* 

It was in this spirit, with these orders, that the 
boys of England went forth in 1914, as you are now 
going forth — as Crusaders for the Right, each remem- 
bering what he had learned on the cricket-field : that 
come victory, come defeat, men must always "play 
the game," giving hard, taking manfully, and battling 
with clean hands, in order that when triumph comes 
it may be deserved. 



Chapter III. 
THE BRITISH NAVY. 

WHEN Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign 
Secretary, declared in his memorable speech 
in the House of Commons on August 3, 1914, that 
England had no intention of ' ' running away from 
the obligations of honor ' ' toward Belgium and 
France, he added : 

'" V/e are prepared. We are prepared for the 
consequences that may arise from the attitude 
we have adopted. We are ready to take our 
part." 

What Grey meant was that " our Sure Shield," 
as the Britishers call their Navy, was ready. It's 
a way they've had in the Navy for 900 years, for 
since William the Conqueror came from Normandy 
in 1066, British soil has never been trodden by an 
invader. The geographical date which you and I, as 
American schoolboys, best remembered was 1492, 
when Christopher Columbus hiked across the Atlantic 
to an unimagined destination and made the most im- 
portant discovery in the world's history. The date 
that every British schoolboy knows by heart is 1066. 
It is well that he does, for it marks the historical fact 
that for nearly nine centuries, this little bunch 
of islands in the North Sea — whose total area of 
121,000 odd square miles is smaller than that of our 



The British Navy 31 

State of New Mexico — has not only been preserved 
from the ignominy and horrors of invasion, but has 
become the centre of a Commonwealth of great 
Nations. On its vast territories in two hemispheres 
the sun never sets. Its 13,150,000 square miles girdle 
the globe and 450,000,000 souls acknowledge the 
Democratic sovereignty of the British Crown. Millions 
of them have been killed and maimed in the defence 
of their gigantic realm during the past four years of 
bloodshed and tears. But not one solitary, inch of it 
has ever been soiled by German invasion. Do you 
know the reason why? The answer is, The British 
Navy. 

I have set myself the task of sketching in a short 
chapter a subject to which some day an entire 
encyclopaedia will be devoted — the story of the 
British Navy since 1914. But we Yanks have a gift 
for grasping the essentials of a thing if its outstanding 
features are put before us. That is all I intend to 
try. Do you realize, for example, that 1,750,000 
American troops have been safely landed "Over 
There ' ' mainly because Great Britain commands the 
seas? 

Between April 1 and July 1, 1918, about 
900,000 United States soldiers crossed the ocean, 
bound for France. That is an average of 300,000 a 
month, or 10,000 a day. With the exception of the 
291 lives we lost when the Germans torpedoed the 
"Tuscania," that gigantic feat of transport, like which 
there has been nothing in history, was accom- 
plished as serenely as if those footpads of the 



32 Explaining the Britishers 

sea, U-boats, had never been invented. Two-thirds 
of those 900,000 Americans were ferried over the 
herring-pond in vessels of the British Mercantile 
Marine. Our own Navy had a glorious share in 
landing General Pershing's Army in Europe in time to 
play an effective role in France. I know with what 
joy and pride you have seen the Stars and Stripes 
flapping from our own warships which have convoyed 
you to Europe, or through the danger zone around 
the British Isles. I know the sense of security their 
proximity inspired in you. Yet even the United States 
Navy could not have played its great part if the 
British Fleet had not cinched the command of the sea 
at the outset of the war and held it unchallenged 
from that hour to this. Admiral Sims and the United 
States naval forces now operating in European waters 
— an Armada of more than 250 vessels and 45,000 
officers and men — would have had urgent business 
nearer home. 

In other words, you and I are safe and sound in 
Europe to-day, because Britannia still "rules the 
waves.'' Only once during the entire war — at the 
Battle of Jutland, on May 31, 1916— has the 
Kaiser's Fleet made a serious attempt to break 
out of the iron ring which the British Navy so relent- 
lessly keeps drawn around the German coasts. The 
Germans' object on that occasion — the " enterprise,'* 
as they described it, on which they set out — was to 
contest and demolish British supremacy at sea. If 
the Germans had accomplished their purpose, the war 
would have come to a sudden and disastrous end for 




THE BASEBALL GAME, 
LONDON, 4th JULY, 1918. 

The King says " Good Luck " 
to the Navy team Captain. 
Admiral Sims in the offing. 



Photo : Contra! tfewt 




nog 
2§£ 



O 5 



,o 



The British Navy 33 

Liberty's cause. There would have been no occasion 
for America to "come in." There would have been 
nothing to "come in " for. We should have had 
to face practically single-handed and alone a Europe 
of which Germany was the indisputable master. But 
the Huns' "enterprise" was wrecked. Admiral Beatty 
gave the German Fleet, though at cruelly heavy 
cost to his own in ships and men, such a frightful 
mauling that the Germans have never once since then 
dared to show their nose in any way that would enable 
the British to take a second crack at them. Now 
and then their destroyers dash into the North 
Sea on raids, always turning tail as soon as danger 
was scented. But their so-called High Seas Fleet has 
not looked for a stand-up fight for the last two years. 
Whenever the Germans are ready to repeat their 
"enterprise," they will find Beatty (and Sims) ready, 
too. To date they have evinced no taste for another 
dose of the medicine they got at Jutland. 

Every once in a while I hear Britishers asking, 
"What is the Navy doing?" Americans frequently 
ask the same thoughtless question. People know what 
the British Army is doing because its heroic deeds are 
recorded in the open, day by day, by men who are 
given that special task. The limelight is on the Army 
all the time. But the Navy has to work in silence and 
out of sight. Only on those rare occasions when 
German men-of-war appear on the surface of the 
sea are we reminded that the British Navy is on the 
job. Yet it is on the job day and night, in sunshine and 
storm, summer and winter, always and everywhere. 

2 



34 Explaining the Britishers 

Lord Nelson, England's immortal sailor, whose 
one-armed effigy stands eternal sentinel on the tall 
column which bears his name in London's Trafalgar 
Square, said that in Naval warfare "Time is every- 
thing ; five 'minutes make the difference between a 
victory and a defeat." So while the European storm- 
clouds were gathering, the British Navy, on July 29, 
1914, took time by the forelock, moved silently from 
its moorings on the West coast and assembled at 
strategic anchorages in the East and North. Hence- 
forward the Navy became known as " The Grand 
Fleet," an unexampled organization of fighting 
strength ; and from that moment every possibility 
of Germany's winning' the war vanished. She had 
lost her one conceivable chance of securing the 
command of the sea. It is our own celebrated naval 
expert, Admiral Mahan, you know, who has shown 
that Sea Power is the decisive factor in war. When 
Britain, without firing a shot, grasped that power, 
Germany's hope of enslaving civilization and im- 
posing upon it the rule of Brute Force was shattered 
and wrecked. 

What has the British Navy done in the four years 
that have intervened? 

To begin with, first and foremost, it has 
effectually baffled the hopes and plans of 
Germany to win the war with U-boats. 

Let me say right here that the Britishers are the 
first to acknowledge that the American Navy has 
proved itself a friend in need. It has had an important 



The British Navy 35 

hand in smashing up the U-boat campaign. When 
Admiral Sims and our first destroyer flotilla came to 
England in the Spring of 1917, the submarine war 
was in full blast. More than 1,000,000 tons of Allied 
shipping were sunk in April of that year. Well, one 
thing is dead sure — the sinkings ' ' curve ' ' has been 
bending even more markedly in the wrong direction 
for Germany since American naval forces have co- 
operated in fighting the submarine. Some day we'll 
know just how many U-boats that never got back 
home had Sims' chasers and depth-charges to thank 
for their fate. We shall be proud of the figures and 
of the deeds of heroism and skill which they repre- 
sent. Submarines have continued to cause enormous 
damage to British and Allied shipping. They are not 
yet killed off, but they have failed in their main object, 
which was to starve England and destroy British sea 
power. As the British Prime Minister puts it, "the 
U-boat has ceased to be a peril and is now only a 
nuisance." 

In addition to defeating the submarine campaign, 
the British Navy has : 

Blockaded Germany and bottled up the 
German Navy. 

Driven German commerce from the sea. 

Preserved the British Empire from invasion. 

Brought Germany to the verge of starvation. 

Enabled the British Empire to wage war in 

ten different parts of the world. 

2a 



36 Explaining the Britishers 

Kept the high seas open for the legitimate 
service of mankind. 

Made ultimate defeat of Germany absolutely 
certain, no matter how long delayed. 

These are the facts about the British Navy. Now 
let me give you a few figures. " Figures talk," we 
Americans say. None ever talked more eloquently 
than these. The British Navy has : 

Increased its total tonnage from 2,500,000 
to 8,000,000. 

Patrolled incessantly the 140,000 square 
nautical miles of the North Sea. 

Steamed in one month alone (June, 1918) 
8,000,030 miles, 

Sunk, destroyed or captured 150 German 
Submarines. 

Raised its personnel from 145,000 to 450,000. 

Transported 20,000,000 men, 2,000,000 
horses and mules, 500,000 vehicles, 
25,000,000 tons of war munitions and 
stores to British fronts throughout the 
world, 51,000,000 tons of oil and fuel, and 
130,000,000 tons of food and other 
material. 

Armed and maintained 3,500 auxiliary patrol 
boats, as against less than 20 when war 
began. 



The British Navy 37 



Enabled food for the 46,000,000 inhabitants 
of Great Britain and Ireland to be brought 
from oversea, despite the furious German 
U-boat campaign whose principal object 
was to "choke" them into submission. 

Kept Britain's 8,000,000 odd soldiers and 
sailors well fed and weil armed, no 
matter how distant the field in which they 
were fighting. 

Made possible the uninterrupted supply of 
munitions, coal and food needed by the 
armies, navies, and 75,000,000 inhabitants 
of France and Italy. 

This is what the British Navy has done. Think 
over it carefully, and you will rightly come to the 
conclusion that but for the British Fleet the war might 
have been over and won by Germany months, even 
years, ago. Truly the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, 
has said: "Unless the Allies had been completely 
triumphant at the outset of the war at sea, no efforts 
on land would have saved them. The British Fleet 
is mainly responsible for that complete triumph." 

The symbol of the British Navy is a bulldog. It 
has fought like a bulldog every time it has had a 
chance to show its teeth. I would need a whole 
chapter of this booklet merely to catalogue the names 
of the British men and boys of " the bulldog breed " 
who have won heroes* laurels in the long and grim 
struggle at sea. The fights put up by destroyer crews, 



38 Explaining the Britishers 

in desperate melees with German submarines and 
torpedo-boats, will supply material some day for 
thrilling and glorious tales. Whether opportunity 
has come to him to distinguish himself or not, 
every mother's son in the British Navy has had 
perpetually in his mind's eye the signal that Nelson 
flew at the battle of Trafalgar in J 805 : "England 
expects this day that every man will do his 
duty." Admiral Hood and the gallant 6,000 or 
7,000 officers and men who went down with their 
ships in the Battle of Jutland did their duty. " Jack " 
Cornwell, a ship's boy, who lost his life in that same 
glorious scrap, sticking to his post to the last second, 
showed the stuff that British sailor-lads are made 
of. Nineteen-year-old midshipman Donald Gyles, 
of the destroyer "Broke," who single-handed drove 
off six burly Germans who attempted to board his 
ship, was a chip of the old block. Captain Fryatt, of 
the North Sea mercantile service, whom the Germans 
captured, tortured and murdered, will be for all time 
a token of the bravery that inspires the sea-dogs of 
the British race. The thousands of fishermen of Britain 
who are sweeping mines throughout the vast stretch of 
sea from Shetland to Greenland, from Greenland to 
Iceland, from Iceland to the coast of Norway — " the 
most savage waters in the world, always angry, resent- 
ing the intrusion of man by every device known to 
Nature" — do their duty, unseen, unsung, unknown. 
The brawny sailors, thanks to whose competent care 
and indifference to danger so many of you were 
brought in safety to this side of the world — the tars 



The British Navy 39 

who man the passenger and food ships, the munition- 
carrying freighters, the huge troop-transports — these, 
too, as none knows better than yourselves, are doing 
their duty. 

The U-boat campaign is aimed principally, as you 
know, at the British Mercantile Marine. Among that 
splendid service the German pirates have claimed 
many victims. When 1 recall the names of the 
"Lusitania," and the " Sussex," and the "Arabic," 
and all the other vessels which have been torpedoed, 
you will know what I mean when I refer to the terrors 
which the British merchant service has so bravely 
faced. But the Germans made another of their bad 
guesses about British character when they thought that 
their murderous torpedoes would scare the British 
sailor from the sea. It has had only one effect on that 
bluff and hardy mariner. It has made him hate 
the word German with a fury that the authors of U- 
boat warfare will rue for the rest of their damnable 
lives. I should not like to be a member of the crew 
of the first German ship that pokes its nose into a 
British harbor after the war. Some welcome is in 
pickle for that bunch, believe me. 

When danger calls, the British Navy is always there. 
In April, 1918, it was decided to sink some old ships, 
partly laden with concrete, in order to seal up the 
Germans' principal U-boat nests, the Belgian harbors 
of Zeebrugge and Ostend. It was a certain chance 
for glory — and death, and everybody realized that the 
men chosen to carry out the expedition had a through 
ticket to Davy Jones's locker. Yet three times as 



40 Explaining the Britishers 

_ — t 

many British sailors volunteered for the job as were 
needed. The Hobson tradition, established by 
American sailors in Santiago harbor in 1898, prevails 
throughout the British sea service. Though U-boats 
make life at sea as dangerous as the front-line 
trenches, the Mercantile Marine has more boys than 
it can use for 1 8 months ! So much for the effect of 
submarines on Young Britain's nerve. 

And then there is the aviation branch, the sleepless 
eye, of the Grand Fleet. German aircraft, both 
Zeppelins and aeroplanes, have shown truly enough 
that England " is no longer an island." But the im- 
punity with which German sky pirates used to visit 
and harass these shores is a thing of the past. They 
cannot, of course, be kept away altogether. Yet on 
the occasion of their last attempt to murder sleeping 
women and babes on British soil— it was in August 
of this year — the Germans discovered to their cost 
and chagrin that the British Navy has a punch in the 
air as well as on the sea. A Zeppelin squadron, com- 
manded by the enemy's most skilful airship pilot, 
Captain Strasser, who had raided England often 
before, was driven from the East Coast when it tried 
to approach and sent scurrying back across the North 
Sea battered and burning. The squadron's flagship, 
with Strasser and his crew, was pursued 40 miles out 
to sea, then attacked at close range by airmen of the 
Grand Fleet's air force, and finally sent crashing into 
the sea, a flaming wreck. It was a Jutland in the 
sky. Another German " enterprise " had been 
nipped in the bud. 



The British Navy 41 

The German propaganda has dinned incessantly 
into the world's ears that the Kaiser is fighting to 
secure and assure "the freedom of the seas." The 
Germans try to excuse the tyranny of Militarism 
and its menace to Civilization by shrieking that 
" Prussian Militarism " is no worse than " British 
Navalism." It has only been since 1914 that the 
Germans have discovered that the seas are not "free." 
Prior to then they were as "free" to German 
ships and as open to their peaceful activities as 
they were to the ships of the rest of the world. The 
leviathans of Hamburg and Bremen entered the ports 
of Liverpool, Dover, Plymouth and Southampton, 
Cape Town and Sydney, Montreal and Vancouver, 
Bombay, Singapore and Kingston— wherever the 
Union Jack flew — as " freely " as British ships them- 
selves. German shipping, indeed, grew fat and 
prosperous because of the complete freedom of the 
seas. 

It was Admiral Mahan, the American whom I 
have already quoted, who pointed out that "con- 
ceptions of representative Government, law and 
liberty prevail in North America from the Arctic 
Circle to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, because the command of the sea at 
the decisive era belonged to Great Britain." If it 
had not, Napoleon's sway might have been estab- 
lished over what is now Democratic North and South 
America ; and if the same command of the sea did 
not belong to the same Great Britain at this hour, 
that imitation Napoleon, that would-be world-con- 



42 Explaining the Britishers 

queror, William II. of Potsdam, would even now be 
stretching his blood-smeared tentacles across the 
hemisphere which the Monroe Doctrine stakes out 
as American territory for all time. 

I shall stand no nonsense from America after 
the war," said the Kaiser to Mr. Gerard at Berlin. 

Which means, if it means anything, that the guns 
of the Grand Fleet, the bulldogs which bark when 
Beatty gives the word, have stood during the past 
four years not only between German aggression and 
the British Isles, but between that hideous tyranny 
and the security of our own beloved United States. 

That is something else that the British Navy has 
done. 



Chapter IV. 
THE BRITISH ARMY. 

WHEN the Britishers declared war on Germany 
in August, 1914, their standing army — the 
troops they had ready to send abroad as an Ex- 
peditionary Force — numbered roundly about 160,000. 
It was a small army, measured by modern standards, 
but as the British barrack-yard ditty puts it, "A Little 
3ritish Army Goes a Dam Long Way." 

Meantime more than 7,500,000 men have 
been enrolled. Of that mighty total there have 
been lost in killed alone more than five times 
the number of the original Expeditionary Force, 
or 800,000. Some estimates place the total 
of killed even higher and assert that 900,000 
Britishers have "gone West. 91 

I can almost hear you gasp when "you read these 
figures; and well you may, for there is not one 
American out of a hundred who realizes how lavishly 
British blood has been poured out in the common 
cause. What Americans have been told incessantly 
during the past four years is that England was pre- 
pared to fight "to the last Frenchman." As soon 
as Uncle Sam waded into the fray, the German Pro- 
paganda varied its deceitful tune and said that 
England would fight "to the last American." 



44 Explaining the Britishers 

Sometimes the German hot-air merchants put it 
this way "England is playing safe. She always 
does. It's her game to let the other fellows get killed 
and save her own skin." A lot of us believed these 
tales. Some Americans believe them yet. 

What are the facts ? British casualties in 



officers and men have been 


as 


follows :- 


August, 1914, to the end of 




1915 


... 


550,000 


In the year 1916 


... 


650,000 


In the year 1917 


... 


800,000 


In six months of 1918 




(estimated) ... 


... 


500,000 



2,500,000 

In other words, far from "playing safe," the 
Britishers' casualties have amounted since 1914 to 
roundly one-third of their entire army. 

America is properly proud of the great army 
she has dispatched to France. By July 4, 1918, 
it was a million in round numbers. But 
Britain has already LOST towards a million in 
dead. I have not exaggerated these figures. 
They are not official, but have been computed 
by competent authorities. We know some of 
the details. During one month in France in 
1917 the Britishers had 27,000 men KILLED. 



The British Army 45 

In the first twelve' months of the war they 
had 6,660 officers and 95,000 men KILLED. 
During the month of April this year, as the result 
of the great battles which began on March 21, 
1918, they had more than 10,000 casualties 
among officers alone. 

In all candor, it is not our fault that we believed 
for so long that the Britishers were not "doing their 
bit." it was their fault. They didn't tell us. They 
were themselves aware that they were doing their 
full duty, but they didn't think it worth while to say 
anything about it. For months and months after the 
war began the Britishers fought it in the dark, as far as 
the outside world was concerned. The Britishers are 
long on self-depreciation. When I lived in Berlin an 
English-owned ' ' Luna Park ' * concern had a red- 
blooded American advertising-man. He considered 
that it was his duty to make the Park known far and 
wide by every means available. One day he rushed 
into the manager's office, bubbling with enthusiasm, 
and announced that after weeks of effort he had 
secured permission to put up an electric flash sign 50 
feet high and 150 feet across in Potsdamer-Platz — a 
district like 42nd and Broadway. The American 
expected his English manager to explode with joy. 
He did nothing of the sort. He lit a fresh cigarette, 
thought for a minute or two, and then said : " But 
don't you think a sign of that kind will be a bit 
conspicuous }" 

Now, that is exactly the British point of view where 



46 Explaining the Britishers 

their own deeds and virtues are concerned. They 
do not believe in talking about them. They expect 
people to take them for granted. So it has been 
with their war achievements. Though the little 
British Army that fought at Mons won glory 
enough to last the nation for all time, little more 
was said about it than if Mons had been a sham 
battle on Salisbury Plain. Britishers from Canada, 
Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfound- 
land, from all the Dominions oversea, were pouring 
across the seven seas by the shipload to fight for King, 
Liberty and Motherland. From the great Empire of 
India native troops led by rajahs rushed to arms and 
to the strange and far-off battlefields of France 
because the issues at stake meant as much for Cal- 
cutta, Bombay, or Delhi as they did for London, 
Liverpool, Toronto, Melbourne or Capetown. From 
the cities, towns and hamlets of England, Scotland, 
Wales and Ireland the Britishers who inhabited their 
own Isles flocked to the colors in myriads. 

Meantime, while " Kitchener's Army " of volun- 
teers was being hurriedly recruited and trained, the 
British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium 
was fighting for its very life. Not only was it handi- 
capped by inferior numbers but it was compelled to 
face the crack divisions of the Kaiser's Army so short 
of guns and shells that it will for ever remain a miracle 
that it was not wiped out of existence in the first 
ninety days of the war. It was well supplied with 
only one thing — unbreakable courage. In October 
around Ypres (in Belgium) the British Army, still 



The British Army 47 

hopelessly outnumbered, outgunned and outshelled> 
was engaged in as ferocious a struggle with the 
Germans as the history of war records. The Ger- 
mans were making their first desperate bid for Calais 
and the coast of the English Channel, in the hope of 
attacking by land, sea and air their "grimmest and 
most stubborn foe — England." Ypres was pounded 
into a shell. The countryside for miles in every direc- 
tion was fertilized red by the blood of British soldiers, 
who fell in thousands. But Ypres did not fall. Above 
its shattered fragments the Union jack still flies. The 
road to Calais remains barred. Again and again the 
Germans have tried to gain it, but never so fiercely 
or at such terrible cost to the defenders as in those 
soul-trying days of October and November, 1914. 

How many Americans know the story of Mons 
and Ypres? In battle glory they reduce to insig- 
nificance anything that happened at Waterloo. Yet 
the Britishers did not advertise them. It was not their 
way. They had helped to save Civilization — that was 
all. But nobody in England thought it important 
enough to bluster about for the benefit of foreign 
countries. Nobody saw any use in letting the out- 
side world know the glorious news that from every 
nook and corner of the Empire the British clans were 
gathering. Nobody considered it worth his while 
to make known the fact that the British Lion was 
rousing himself slowly, but determinedly, for a fight 
to the finish. Nobody found it advisable to let people 
know that the British Fleet had already won the war 
at sea. Nobody said one solitary word about any 



48 Explaining the Britishers 



of these things. To a large extent the British Censor 
wouldn't allow anything to be said. But to a still 
larger extent nothing was said because the British, as 
Kipling remarked of Lord Roberts, "don't advertise." 
I visited the United States in February and March, 
1915. The war had been on for nearly eight months. 
The British casualty lists were already enormous. 
John Bull was in it up to his neck — in blood and 
tears — but not grumbling. What was it Americans 
asked me when I got home? They wanted to know 
"When is England going to do something?" It is 
the Britishers' passion for self-suppression that caused 
us to think they were asleep at the switch. 

Now I am going to tell you, in the eloquent 
language of figures, just what the Britishers have 
done in the way of raising an army. 

They began the war with an Expeditionary 
Force, as I have already explained, of 1 60,000. 
By the end of 1917, after three and a quarter 
years, the British Army had grown to almost 
ffty times that size, or 7,500,000. The 
Germans tried to make the world believe that 
England was fighting not only "to the last 
Frenchman" but "to the last Colonial." The 
figures show up this libel, too, in its true colors. 
Out of the 7,500,000 men provided by the 
Empire up to the end of 1917, 5,600,000 or 
74.7 per cent — about three-quarters — came from 




" TOMMY ATKINS.' 

A Famous British 

Poster, 

By Bert Thomas. 



By courtesy of Messrs. Martins, f.hf. 



The British Army 



49 



and, Scotland, 


Wales and 


Ireland. 1 


ortions were as 


follow : 


Per Cent 
of Total. 


England 


4,530,000 


... 60.4 


Scotland 


620,000 


... 8.3 


Wales 


280,000 


... 3.7 


Ireland 


170,000 


... 2.3 


Australia 


I 




New Zealand 






Canada 


\- 900,000 


... 12.0 


Newfoundland 






South Africa 






India and other 






Oversea 






dominions 


1,000,000 


... 13.3 


Total ... 


7,500,000 


... 100.0 



The 



That is to say, the British Isles themselves — 
this little country that Texas could swallow up twice 
over and whose population isn't half as large as that 
of the United States — have raised even a bigger army 
than the 5,000,000-men establishment planned by us 
Americans ourselves. By July 1918, Great Britain 
had raised more than 8,000,000 men for all the pur- 
poses of war. Reviewing the Britishers' achievement, 
their Prime Minister truly said that if the United 
States of America were to call to the Colors the same 
number in proportion to population it would mean 
very nearly 15,000,000 men, 



50 Explaining the Britishers 

Before I leave the statistical side of the British 
Army, I want to nail another German campaign lie. 
Since the war began the world has been familiar with 
three kinds of fakes — plain lies, damned lies, and 
German propaganda. One of the propaganda lies 
that the Swindle Department of the Kaiser's Govern- 
ment loves to keep in circulation is that the Britishers 
systematically save the skins of English soldiers and 
let the "Colonials" (Australians, Canadians, New 
Zealanders and other Dominion troops) do the dirty 
work and get killed. Once again there are figures 
which show at a glance what the facts are. Study this 
little table :— 

Percentage of Population of British Empire 
and Percentage of Troops supplied by 
Countries named : 

Population. Troops Raised. Casualties. 
Per Cent. Per Cent. Per Cent. 

England ... 62 70] 

Scotland ... 8 9[ 86 

Ireland ... 7 6 J 

Overseas ... 23 16 14 

(This table does not include India.) 

You see that England, Scotland and Ireland con- 
tributed 85 per cent of the troops raised, and suffered 
a fraction more than a corresponding quota of the 
losses. The Colonies furnished 16 per cent of the 
men, and suffered 2 per cent less of the casualties. 
Australian casualties to midsummer, 1918, worked out 
at about 1\ per cent of the total British losses ; 



The British Army 51 

Canada's casualties, at about 6| per cent. The pro- 
portion of British casualties to Colonial casualties 
during the last half of 1917 per Division was 7 to 6. 

By the time this booklet reaches the hands of the 
men for whose information it was written — the 
American' soldiers and sailors who have already 
reached Europe — many of them will have made the 
acquaintance, face to face, of British soldiers and 
sailors. Other Yanks, to whose attention I fondly 
hope the booklet may come, will have brushed 
shoulders with Tommies in the fighting-line. I shall 
not need to tell those Americans what sort of 
scrappers the Britishers are. The best witnesses on 
that point would be German prisoners. Any of these 
who have fought on the Western front could say 
things about Tommy Atkins far more eloquent and 
convincing than anything my faithful Waterman 
could put on paper. 

On August 8 and 9, 1918, when Haig's army 
smashed the crack corps of Hindenburg's forces and 
liberated Amiens, the Britishers delivered a blow 
that the Germans themselves described as ' ' the first 
reverse we had suffered during the war." That is 
not quite true, for when the French and British won 
the first battle of the Marne in September, 1914, the 
Germans sustained a ' ' reverse ' ' from which they have 
never recovered. But the punch in the jaw that 
Tommy gave Fritz in August of this year was the 
first dose of the real stuff that the Britishers have 
handed the Germans. It was the goods, because 
it represented the British Army at last in its full stride. 



52 Explaining the Britishers 

fortified by four years' experience with every device 
of warfare, however devilish, that the German method 
of fighting had taught it to employ. 

The Army that Haig sent into battle to relieve 
Amiens took, in the single month of August : — 

57,318 prisoners, including 1,283 officers ; 
657 guns, including over 150 "Heavies"; 
5,750 machine-guns ; 
1,000 trench-mortars ; 

3 complete railway trains ; 
9 locomotives ; 
Numerous complete ammunition and 
engineering dumps, including hundreds 
of thousands of rounds of artillery and 
rifle ammunition, and war materials of 
all sorts. 

The British Army that gave the Germans that 
stinging upper-cut was no longer the outnumbered, 
outgunned, outshelled Army that fought a forlorn 
hope at Mons in August, 1914. This August, superi- 
ority of strength and skill was on the British side. 

Thanks very largely to their magnificent equip- 
ment with aircraft and with that exclusively British 
invention, the tank — I think the tank is charac- 
teristically British because it is big, cumbersome, 
slow-moving and deadly once it gets started — the 
Tommies simply waded through the Germans. 
American troops fought with Haig, too, and there 
must be plenty of Yank eye-witnesses who can con- 



The British Army 53 



firm every word I am now setting down, viz., that on 
August 8 and 9 of 1918 A.D., the British Army 
showed once and for all that it is the equal of any 
fighting organization that ever took the field. It took 
the Britishers four years to get going, but ' ' by the 
splendor of God," as their King Henry used to vow, 
they have done it. 

The British Army (supported and succored always 
by the British Navy, don't forget) has not been 
playing a merely defensive role on the blood- 
soaked plains of France and Belgium. It has 
fought in a dozen different places — in various 
parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. It has conquered 
all the German Colonies overseas. To-day, with the 
Russians out of the war, the Britishers are fighting 
the Turkish army almost single-handed in Mesopo- 
tamia. General Allenby, with English, Australian, 
and Indian troops, has destroyed the Turkish armies 
in Palestine and recovered the Holy Land. The 
Britishers fought the Bulgarians in Macedonia and in- 
vaded Bulgaria. They are rounding up the remnants 
of the German Army still at large in East Africa 
and the Cameroons. They rushed to the help 
of Italy last winter when the Austrians broke 
the Italian front. In the far north of Russia, 
at Archangel, British troops have landed, in 
order that Germany may not seize Russia's 
one gateway to the Atlantic. At Vladivostok, on the 
Pacific Coast. British troops are in line alongside 
American, Japanese and gallant Czecho-Slovak con- 
tingents in order to preserve Siberia from the rapacious 



54 Explaining the Britishers 

designs of Germany in that direction. In all theatres 
of war British armies up to October, 1918, had taken 
about 300,000 prisoners, including 175,000 in France. 

The spoils of Napoleonic victory have not yet 
fallen to the Britishers' lot. But when the full story 
of the Great War is written, I believe its chroniclers 
will say that Britain bit off far more than Napoleon 
ever tried to chew — and chewed it. 

By backing France for four long years, the British 
Army saved Europe. The Britishers held the fort — 
the fort from which you and they, marching shoulder 
to shoulder with our glorious and invincible French 
Allies, are now sallying forth to victory. 



Chapter V. 
THE HOME ARMY. 

MODERN war is not merely a matter of soldiers, 
guns and ships. It has to be waged on two 
fronts, one just as important as the other — the fighting 
line and at home. The folks you khaki chaps left 
behind you — the tens of millions who don't wear 
uniforms, obtain commissions or reap any of the spec- 
tacular glory of war — are just as essential to conduct- 
ing and winning the war as soldiers in the trenches 
or sailors on battleships. They make up the Home 
Army, without whose loyalty and industry the real 
army "Over There" would soon become useless. 

In previous chapters I have dealt with the regular 
Army and Navy of Great Britain. I would now like 
to tell you what the Home Army has done, for the 
achievements of the civilian population of these 
islands are as splendid and vital a contribution 
to Liberty's Cause as anything their fighting lads 
have accomplished. It is solely because this class 
of Britishers — men, women and children — have 
" carried on " patiently, uncomplainingly, for four 
hard years that the .British Army and Navy are not 
only still intact, despite heavy losses, but are in 
every way stronger than ever. It is the devotion of 
the Home Army that has enabled the Government 
to build up a gigantic munition industry. British 



56 Explaining the Britishers 

civilians have given freely of their money, subscrib- 
ing incessantly from their savings for War Loans 
and submitting without a whimper to heavy taxes on 
their incomes and on some of the principal necessities 
of life. They have tolerated uncomplainingly the 
rationing of their food. They have accepted rigid 
control of their drink. Indeed, they have almost been 
put on the water-wagon. They have not objected to 
interference with their everyday liberties. They have 
put up, in short, with any and every thing deemed 
necessary to victory. The Germans have done all 
these things because they had to, and whined about 
it. The Britishers have done them because they 
wanted to, and took pride in doing so. 

I don't mean for a minute that Great Britain has 
transferred from the easy-going standards of peace to 
the grim conditions of war without kicking. They 
call it "grousing" over here, and there are just as 
many 4 grousers" to the square inch in these islands 
as there are kickers in other countries. When I 
say that the Britishers have "carried on" in a spirit 
of high-minded patriotism, I mean the great broad 
masses of the country, the overwhelming majority. 
I mean particularly the working-classes, and I mean 
quite particularly the women-folk. British workers 
and British women have been splendid. They have 
borne the brunt magnificently. 

In your meanderings up and down England and 
Scotland and Wales you are meeting, I guess, 
many a Britisher who tells you he is " fed up " with 
the war The chances are you'll hear Tommies 



The Home Army 57 

home on leave say the same thing, especially lads 
with the Mons Ribbon or chevrons, which indicate 
that they've been in the game going on four 
years or a little less. Yes, the Britishers are "fed 
up " with the war. Good Lord, who wouldn't be, 
after what ihey have gone through ? Do you suppose 
that we Yanks will be as eager, as "keen" (as 
the English say), about the war as we are now if 
Providence inflicts four years of it on us? We shall 
be more than human if we are. But don't make the 
mistake of imagining that "fed up" means despair. 
It may mean that the Britishers are tired. War-worn 
they certainly are. Heaven knows, a rest is coming 
to them. But that does not mean they are ready to 
throw up the sponge. The piece of war slang that 
summarizes the Britishers best is this bit of doggerel : 
"Are we Downhearted} NOV 

As the war drags on from month to month, and 
from year to year, I often think of John Bull as a 
champion heavyweight pugilist, like our " John L." 
of immortal memory. "John L." faced many a 
tough antagonist in his day. Usually he knocked 
them out in the early rounds, but every once in a 
while he met: a man who made him fight like hell 
for a dozen rounds or more. The champion on these 
occasions had to stretch himself to the limit of his 
powers. One of his eyes was blackened. Good red 
blood oozed from his battered nose. He was black 
and blue at half a dozen places, but his wind was all 
right, his vision was not impaired, his arms could still 
shoot out rights, lefts and upper-cuts, and he was 



58 Explaining the Britishers 

firmly on his legs. To rattle " John L.," the other 
fellow's seconds would call out: "Why don't you 
quit — you're groggy ! " And then the champion, by 
way of contemptuous retort, would hand his opponent 
a stiffer punch than any " John L." had yet delivered. 
The British — "exhausted," so the German Govern- 
ment told the German people — handed Hindenburg 
this summer the nastiest smack in the eye that he has 
had for many a day. John Bull gave Heinie a little 
of the " John L." stuff. 

The Britishers' attitude toward the war— the atti' 
tude of the Home Army — reminds me, too, 
of the American Admiral in our 1812 war with 
England. When the Admiral was asked to surrender 
because his inferior squadron was badly mauled, he 
replied: "Surrender? By God, I've only begun to 
fight ! " Yes, the Britishers have been badly mauled. 
But now that at last they face the Germans on some- 
thing like equal terms, instead of bare-breasted 
against a foe which had been getting ready for 
nearly fifty years, they have "only begun to fight." 

The Britishers face the Germans on approxi- 
mately equal terms mainly because they are to-day 
provided with the principal sinews of war — arms and 
ammunition — on a gigantic scale. While the Army 
and Navy were holding the foe at bay on land 
and sea, the Home Army created an industrial 
plant that has been well described as ' ' the miracle 
of munitions." John Bull opposed the Mailed Fist of 
the Kaiser in 1914 with practically an ungloved hand. 
The original Expeditionary Force went into battle at 



The Home Army 59 

Mons, I suppose, with about as many machine-guns 
per division as the German Army had per company. 
It was May, 1915 — ten months after the war started — 
before the Britishers discovered that they were fighting 
against Germany's high-explosive shells with almost 
useless shrapnel. Our comrades-in-arms had paid 
dearly in life and treasure before they found that out, 
but it proved to be the turning-point of the war. 
Thereupon the British Government created a 
" Ministry of Munitions," which set itself the task not 
only of making up the deficiency from which the 
Army suffered, but of outstripping the superiority 
which the Germans so long enjoyed. 

The Britishers have done the trick- They have 
out-Krupped Krupps. To-day Britain is one immense 
arsenal, her man and woman power mobilized, her 
industries placed upon a war footing, her every 
thought and energy concentrated upon the single task 
of supplying her fighting forces with their essen- 
tial needs. About 2,500,000 men and 1,000,000 
women are now at work on munition-making — big 
guns, shells, rifles, small-arms ammunition, aero- 
planes, machine-guns, tanks, gas, and all the other 
junk required for "kanning the Kaiser." National 
arsenals (Government-owned munition works) have 
increased from 3 in 1914 to more than 180 in 1918. 
Private manufacturing firms engaged on munitions 
number over 10,000. "Controlled Establishments" 
(firms which give precedence to Government work 
and employ labour under conditions fixed by the 
Ministry of Munitions) now total more than 5,000. 



60 Explaining the Britishers 

The following table shows the comparative rate 
of output in the first four years of the war, with the 
figure 1 as a basis : 



Ammunition : 


1914-15 


1915-16 


1916-17 


1917-18 


For light guns 


1 


5 


19 


15 


For medium guns ••• 


1 


5 


25 


22 


For heavy guns 


1 


6 


70 


400 


For very heavy guns 


1 


21 


220 


280 


Guns : 










Machine guns 


1 


12 


39 


70 


Heavy guns and 










howitzers 


1 


5 


27 


40 


Very heavy guns and 










howitzers 


1 


5 


13 


16 


STEEL (million tons) .. 


7 


9 


10 


10 



To give you an idea of the rate at which the Home 
Army has turned out munitions, let me tell you that 
during the Somme offensive in 1916 Britain was issuing 
to her armies on the Western Front an amount of 
ammunition equal to the entire stock available for 
her land service at the outbreak of the war. During 
the battles of this year (1918) the British Army is 
firing more than double the volume of shells it used 
up on the Somme in 1916. The present rate of out- 
put, moreover, allows for the production next year 
of enough guns and shells to make the British artillery 
stronger still in weight, intensity and striking power. 

During the first five weeks of the German offensive 
which compelled the British to retreat, in March and 
April, 1918, from their hard-won positions on the 
Somme, the British lost nearly 1,000 field-guns and 



The Home Army 61 



between 4,000 and 5,000 machine-guns — including 
captured and destroyed. The amount of ammunition 
lost in dumps amounted to something between a 
week's and three weeks* total manufacture. These 
admissions are official. None the less, by the end of 
April all of these losses were more than made good, 
and there were actually more serviceable guns and 
ammunition available than when the battle opened. 

In aeroplane construction, too, the British have 
accomplished wonders. British factories are to-day 
building in a single week more flying-machines than 
they made during the whole of 1914; in a single 
month, more than were made in the whole of 1915 ; 
and in three months more than in the whole of 1916. 
The output for the whole of 1918 will be several times 
what h was during 1917. 

These colossal achievements — there is no other 
description for them — are the result of two things : 
the Britishers' talent for organization, mistakenly 
thought to be a German monopoly, and the 
zeal and patriotism of British workers, especially 
women. Nine-tenths of the whole manufacture of 
shells are due to the labor of women and girls who 
before the war had never even seen a lathe I I feel 
like taking off my hat to every British lass I see in 
the brown or blue "kit of a munition worker, or in 
the uniform of a 'bus-conductor, or driving an Army 
or Navy or Air-Force automobile, or doing any of the 
many other jobs that girls and women are holding 
down in order to liberate men for the fighting services. 
If you could see, as I have seen, British girls of 18, 



62 Explaining the Briiishers 

20 or 23, at work in the great steel-mills of Sheffield — 
at Hadfield's or Firth's — swinging 1 10-lb. red-hot steel 
ingots into the hydraulic presses — unafraid, skilled, 
veritable daughters of Titan — you, too, would feel like 
saluting them ; for it is they who are mainly respon- 
sible for the fact that British heavy artillery is now 
able to pound the German line to a frazzle every time 
the guns bark. And remember that American artillery, 
too, is to a large extent supplied with shells which 
these British women and girls are making. 

Germany hoped to choke the life out of England 
by means of the U-boat, that is to say by destroy- 
ing so many ships that the British Isles could no 
longer import food or the other vital sinews of war. 
Thus the question of ships has been the Britishers' 
chief problem, and here, too, the Home Army has 
worked wonders. The submarines have, indeed, 
played frightful havoc with the world's tonnage. Up 
to August 1 , 1918, according to German official claims, 
the pirates had sunk 18,800,000 tons of shipping — 
Allied and neutral. That is rather more than the 
tonnage of the entire British Mercantile Marine when 
war broke out. The large majority of vessels sunk by 
U-boats has, of course, been British shipping. The 
Britishers tackled with characteristic tenacity the 
question of making good these serious losses. In 
1917, 1,163,000 gross tons of merchant shipping were 
launched from British yards, as compared with 542,000 
tons in the previous year, and 1,919,000 tons during 
the last year of peace. Since 1917 British shipbuilding 
has been speeded up even still more. In the quarter 



The Home Army 63 

ended June 30th, 1918, there was an increase of 78 per 
cent over the figures for the corresponding three 
months of 1917. 

Hog Island and Seattle aren't the only places 
where shipbuilders know how to hustle. At the great 
Harland & Wolff yard at Belfast (Ireland) the other 
day an 8,000-ton "standard" ship was made ready 
for sea six days after launching, the usual time being 
six weeks. Remember that in addition to replenish- 
ing their Mercantile Marine, the Britishers have had 
to keep up their warship construction. Repair work 
alone, on Naval and Mercantile craft, has been a 
gigantic job. Damaged craft of all nations limps to 
British dry-docks for overhauling. It is no wonder 
that the Britishers look to us to concentrate on new 
shipbuilding. They are confident that ' ' Charlie 
Schwab will deliver the goods, too. 

The primary necessities of war nowadays are "the 
two Ms" — munitions and money. If you have to 
produce tons of munitions, you must put up tons 
of money. The Britishers have not failed in that 
direction. The figures are so fantastic as almost 
to baffle ordinary comprehension. They run not into 
mere millions, but into tens oj billions. The war is 
now costing them about $40,000,000 a day. Up to 
April, 1918, it had cost them about $35,070,000,000. 
By April, 1919, it is estimated that the war bill will 
have reached fifty billion dollars! The Britishers 
are not cnly financing themselves but their European 
Allies as well. The Old Country (England, Scot- 
land and Wales), is, as usual, bearing the burden 



64 Explaining the Britishers 

for the whole Empire. Up to the end of July, 
1918, Great Britain had advanced to her various 
Allies in Europe the fabulous sum of $7,010,000,000 — 
that is to say, more than seven billion dollars. To her 
Colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South 
Africa and the rest) the Motherland had loaned 
another billion— $1 ,042,500,000. The statement of 
her help to her Allies shows advances to 

Russia $2,840,000,000 

France 2,010,000,000 

Italy 1,565,000,000 

Belgium ""j 

Serbia L 595,000,000 

Greece J 

Total ... $7,010,030,000 
The Chancellor of the Exchequer (the Secretary of 
the Treasury) explained the other day what "a 
thousand million pounds" (five billion dollars) really 
means. "It represents," he said, "the labor of ten 
million men for a whole year." That conveys some 
impression of what the British Home Army is doing 
in the way of providing money for the war. Never 
forget that it has been doing so not for a year and a 
half, like the United States, but for four years. It con- 
tinues to "Pay, Pay, Pay," without a murmur. It 
puts up and shuts up. 

Within this very summer the British have broken 
all their previous financial war records, indeed have 
established a worlds record, by purchasing more than 
$5,000,000,000 in National War Bonds. They did it 
in exactly ten months. No previous loan in any 



-^W,r^.^k;. : - 


pBps^^ 


■mil 






J^ 1 




Si ' 













c 


CO 


5) 


CL 


a 





O^oo 


o 


-« ^ 


cc 


^3 — 
C 


h 




« ^ 


z 

< 




u 


cc 


<o . 


Ui 


OB a 


>, 


c -2 


< 


^£ 


Li 


"S F 


(J 


2 « 


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60 c 


M 


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nC u 


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a: 5 -s 



The Home Army 65 

country ever placed so much actually new money at 
the disposal of the State. It beat even the best Liberty 
Loan record in the United States. Before that the 
world's record was held by the British War Loan of 
1917, which yielded $4,742,295,000 in actual cash 
received. The National War Bond drive, which 
lasted from October, 1917, to August, 1918, surpassed 
even that bumper figure by some $250,000,000. It 
was not a hip-hip-hurrah job of a week or a fortnight, 
mind you, with enthusiasm whipped up by all sorts 
of stunts. It represented regular, plugging, week- 
by-week investment. It meant money given by the 
plain people — the men, women and even the children 
of the Home Army, who dug up their pounds, 
shillings and pence in order to let Germany know that 
Britain, far from being downhearted, is prepared to 
"carry on/' whatever the cost. 

A nation raises money for war by two methods 
— loans and taxation. By loan the Britishers have 
raised since 1914 the colossal sum of $25,850,000,000. 
In addition they have imposed upon themselves 
special war taxation more drastic than anybody 
would ever have thought possible, amounting thus 
far to $9,220,000,000. The Britishers are paying in- 
come-tax at from 56 cents to $2.65 on every five 
dollars they earn above the exemption limit. Think of 
that. The very rich man is paying over one-half of 
his income in income-tax and super-tax alone. Tax 
must be paid on war profits to the extent of 80 per 
cent of the total. The cost of railway travelling has 

3 



66 Explaining the Britishers 

been raised by 50 per cent. Britishers are now about 
to tax themselves four cents on every 25 cents spent on 
luxury articles. 

Meantime the cost of living in Great Britain has 
gone up enormously. The purchasing value of the 
sovereign ($5) for the necessaries of life has been 
reduced to about $3. The ordinary middle-class 
Briton, whose income has not gone up since 1914, is 
to-day practically in the position of having had it cut 
in half, so much has its buying-power decreased. Yet 
the nation continues to come forward with its 
earnings and savings more lavishly, more freely, more 
confidently than ever. 

But even more splendid than the manner in which 
they are giving of their toil and treasure is the un- 
complaining spirit in which the Britishers give of their 
life-blood. That's where their amazing "reserve" 
and composure stand them in good stead. Parents 
lose their second, third, fourth sons ; wives, their 
husbands ; children, their breadwinners. But nobody 
whimpers. Lips are only stiffened! It is Sparta re- 
born. 

The beginning of the fifth year of the war finds 
the Britishers going to it with bull-dog determination 
to "stick it" until they get the only kind of a peace 
they or we will ever accept — a peace that leaves the 
Allies completely victorious and Germany at our 
mercy. 



Chapter VI. 
IRELAND AND THE COLONIES. 

IT will probably be a long time before the world 
decides upon the most appropriate name for the 
war. I still think that General Sherman's description 
was the best for all wars. He called them "Hell." But 
as far as Germany is concerned, the best name would 
be "The War of Miscalculations," or "The War of 
Bad Guesses." When he cranked his mighty 
war-machine in 1914, the Kaiser miscalculated 
right and left. His biggest miscalculation wcs the 
pipe-dream that the Britishers wouldn't fight. But 
even if they would some day be compelled to fight 
— to ward off the attack which Germany was so long 
preparing to launch — the Germans persistently led 
themselves to believe that the war would only be with 
England, Scotland and Ireland. This is the way they 
doped it out : 

"The British Empire will collapse like a house 
of cards the moment the old country finds itself 
mixed up in a serious European war. Ireland 
will secede. India will revolt. Egypt will break 
away. Australia, Canada and New Zealand will 
immediately declare their independence. South 
Africa, still sore from the effects of the Boer War, will 



68 Explaining the Britishers 

seize the opportunity for revenge. England the 
tyrant will find herself stranded and forsaken by her 
oppressed Colonies and Oversea Dominions, and one 
day they will fall into Germany's lap like ripe fruit. 
Germany is the rightful heir to the British Empire." 
Yes, that was the dope in Germany for years. 
I was there, and I know it. I heard it and I wrote 
about it. The people of Germany believed it. They 
read it day after day in their newspapers and political 
literature. If they were university students, they got 
it direct from their professors, who taught the youth 
of the Fatherland war and the glory of war just as 
thoroughly as they taught them philosophy, or 
zoology, or mathematics. The Germans are a very 
systematic nation. They plan out things carefully in 
advance. So one of their long-distance arrangements 
for ' ' The Day ' ' on which they hoped to smash the 
British Empire was the sowing of discord throughout 
the British territories oversea. German spies and 
German intriguers infested Ireland, India, Egypt and 
South Africa. Whenever there was a chance of 
stirring up old-time hatreds of England, these spies 
and intriguers got busy. It has been proved that 
wherever serious unrest has manifested itself in the 
British Empire during the war, Germans, liberally 
supplied with German money, have been the niggers 
in the woodpile. But the funds Were badly invested. 
They produced no results of corresponding value. 
Germany backed the wrong horse when she put her 
money on "British Empire Revolution " in the World- 
War Race. 



Ireland and the Colonies 69 

Take Ireland. Tens of thousands of Pershing's 
great army are Irish by birth or ancestry. I saw a 
statement the other day that 25 per cent of the 
American troops are Roman Catholic. The vast 
majority of that number must be " Oirish lads." 
Ireland is not a happy land. It never has been. It 
is troublous by nature because, as a witty Irishman 
himself has said, "An Irishman doesn't know what 
he wants, and, be jabers, he won't be happy till he 
gets it." Thanks mainly to the activities of Sinn 
Fein agitators during the war certain misguided Irish 
patriots have kept the spirit of unrest alive in 
Ireland. But how insignificant is their number, 
and how miserable the service they rendered 
their country, compared to the thousands of splendid 
Irish troops who have fought on the British side in 
France and elsewhere since the hour of the war's 
beginning ! The great Irish leader — taken away, un- 
fortunately, in the midst of the war — John Redmond, 
made a memorable speech in Parliament on the eve 
of the war. He pledged his word that Ireland 
would remain loyal to Liberty's cause and do nothing 
to prevent Great Britain from fighting at full strength. 
Ireland would not secede, Redmond declared. Last 
year Redmond's own brother, Major Willie Red- 
mond, fell in battle on the Western front, fighting for 
England and for Ireland. Long before that a typical 
young Irishman, a poor boy named Mike O'Leary, 
won the Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery in the 
field. There have been thousands of Willie Red- 
monds and Mike O'Learys, all Irish to the core, 



70 Explaining the Britishers 

who have "done their bit" gallantly and are still 
doing ; t. They are imbued with the spirit that tore 
Tom Kettle, a brilliant young Irish lawyer, from a 
promising career in politics, and fired him with the 
determination to fight and die for Freedom's cause. 
Kettle was a deep-dyed Irish patriot. He was looked 
upon by many people as the future chieftain of the 
Nationalist Party. But he was filled with the solemn 
conviction that no true Irishman could keep out of a 
fight against the nation branded by President Wilson 
as "the natural foe to liberty." So Tom Kettle got 
a commission in the Dublin Fusiliers and eventually 
died a hero's death in France. Irishmen like Red- 
mond and Kettle know that a Hun victory ih this war 
would mean the occupation of Ireland by Germany 
and the enslavement of the Irish people for all time 
under the heel of Prussian militarism. 

In 1914 and 1915 many Irish soldiers fell into 
German hands as prisoners of war. The Kaiser soon 
found out the kind of stuff these brawny sons of Erin 
were made of. He tried to jolly them into forming 
an " Irish Legion " of the German Army. He 
promised them swell green uniforms, with sham- 
rocks embroidered on the collars and harps on 
the caps. He said they might all get drunk 
on St. Patrick's Day at Germany's expense and 
otherwise maintain the glorious traditions of 
March 17th. He tbld them they would be sent 
back to Ireland v/hen the war was over, with their 
pockets filled with captured English gold. He held 



Ireland and the Colonies 71 

out all kinds of baits designed to induce Mike 
and Pat to be traitors. But the boys from Cork and 
Kilkenny, from Killarney and Tipperary, would stand 
for no bunk of that kind, however seductive. The 
Irish Guards, Irish Fusiliers, Connaught Rangers, 
Royal Dublins, Royal Munsters, Irish Rifles, Innis- 
killings, or men of other famous Irish regiments, whom 
Germany wanted to seduce, simply howled down 
the treacherous comrades who tried to make speeches 
to them in favour of the Kaiser. Those whom they 
couldn't howl down, they beat up. The "Irish 
Legion ' ' is still languishing in those abodes of horror 
known as German prison camps. Mike and Pat 
prefer the terrors of German captivity to the glory of 
fighting for the Kaiser. 

I have told you about Ireland at this length 
because many of you are Irish by origin and because 
all Americans love the Irish. I was educated by 
Irish Catholic priests and one of the best friends 1 
have in the world is Father John Cavanaugh, C.S.C., 
President of my Alma Mater of Notre Dame uni- 
versity, Indiana. I played baseball with " Jim " Burns 
and "Mike" Quinlan, who, like Cavanaugh, became 
priests and eminent figures in the American educa- 
tional world. The Very Rev. "Jim" Burns made a 
speech at a Catholic Convention in 'Frisco the other 
day. He said that the khaki uniform which British 
and American soldiers are now wearing ' ' is the livery 
of God and makes our sons and brothers soldiers of 
the Lord." 



72 Explaining the Britishers 

At the same convention another Irish- American, 
John J. Barrett, speaking on Catholic loyalty, said : 

We pledge our country our single-hearted 
allegiance. We entertain no scruples about the 
justice of her participation in the conflict. We 
approve the course she has taken in the crisis, and 
we would have had her take no other. We stand 
ready to promote our country's fortunes at the 
sacrifice of all our resources of human life and 
earthly possessions. With all our strength and 
mind and heart we pray for victory to the arms of 
our country and her gallant Allies. We hold no 
allegiance that conflicts with our love of the flag, 
and wherever it leads we are prepared to follow.' * 

When I read such things, I cannot help thinking 
that Irish-Americans to a man must profoundly regret 
that the Emerald Isle — that " Little Bit of Heaven" — 
has not played more of a man's-sized part in this 
struggle for civilization and liberty. 

Where shall I begin to tell the story of the mag- 
nificent part which the great self-governing Dominions 
of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa 
have played as members of the British Empire? 
Again, for lack of space, I shall have to confine myself 
to a few mere facts and figures. I should like to have 
devoted the whole book to them, for I know how 
fond you Yanks are of the husky boys from the 
Colonies. You rightly discern that they are very 
much like yourselves, in physique and temperament. 
They are wide-shouldered and muscular, tall, lanky 



Ireland and the Colonies 73 



and breezy, and they almost speak our language § 
Brought up, as we were, on vast continents, their point 
of view about life is broad-gauged. Like us, they find 
many things in England small, cramped and insular. 
But they have learned, as you will learn, that size 
isn't everything, and that even islands, if inhabited by 
men and women of red blood, cut ice too. The 
Anzacs from "down under," the Canucks from our 
side of the pond, and the big fellows from South 
Africa will all go home with very different ideas about 
the Old Country ; and, judging by the sky-larking that 
is going on, I guess a good many of them will take 
back English wives, too. 

The significant fact about Colonial participation 
in the war is the evidence it supplies that the Colonies 
believe in the justice of the English cause. The 
Australians and New Zealanders would not have 
come 14,000 miles to fight if they didn't think 
the English case was absolutely on the square. 
The lads of Dutch extraction who drove the 
Germans out of South- West Africa would not 
have left the veldt and crossed 10,000 miles of 
sea to fight in Europe, as they are doing, if they 
weren't dead sure that England deserved their help. 
The Canadians would not have abandoned their 
farms and businesses to hurry across the Atlantic and 
bleed for the Motherland if they were not convinced 
that England was right. By the enthusiasm with which 
the British clans have gathered from the four quarters 
of the Empire, they have exposed the German pro- 
paganda claim that British rule is "tyrannical," that 



74 Explaining the Britishers 



British foreign policy is "deceitful and aggressive," 
and that England went to war for gain and out of 
greed. The Colonials rushed to arms because the 
complete independence which they enjoy within the 
British Empire was just as much threatened by 
Germany as the liberties of England, Scotland, 
Wales and Ireland. 

Australia's population is smaller than that of New 
York City, yet 426,000 Australian soldiers have been 
enlisted, every one of them volunteers. Up to 
August 1, 1918, 321,000 of them had been embarked 
for various Allied fields of battle. That is more men 
than the whole British Empire sent to the South 
African war eighteen years ago ! Considerably over 
8 per cent of Australia's population has "joined up." 
Already 52,385 Australians have been killed in action ; 
135,245 have been wounded, and only 3,353 have sur- 
rendered to the enemy, most of these because wounds 
had put them out of action. The total war expendi- 
ture of Australia exceeds a billion dollars — the exact 
total is $1,100,000,000. For 1918 her war bill will 
amount to $500,000,000. Alone and single-handed 
the 5,000,000 inhabitants of Australia have organized 
and paid for the equipment, transport and up- 
keep of their great army. For the past two years 
Australia has maintained five divisions in France, the 
equivalent of one cavalry division in Egypt and 
Palestine, and kept all battalions to strength by 
constant reinforcements from voluntary enlistment. 
The personnel of the Royal Australian Navy exceeds 
9,000 officers and men. This is the young Fleet 



Ireland and the Colonies 75 

which distinguished itself in the first three months 
of the war by hunting down and destroying the 
famous raider, "Emden." The Australians have 
their own independent army organization — hospitals, 
medical services, aviation branch, training camps, and 
everything. Their Corps in France, commanded by a 
self-made Melbourne businessman (General Sir John 
Monash), greatly distinguished itself in this summer's 
victorious Allied fighting in France. The Australians 
lived up splendidly to the brilliant record made by 
their earliest comrades, the heroes of the Allies' ill 
starred venture at Gallipoli in 1915. The bravery of 
the Australian soldier is now proverbial. There are 
hardly any troops that the Germans so hate to go up 
against as the boys from the bush country, unless it 
be the kilted Scotties, or " ladies from hell," as Fritz 
calls them. Somebody told me that the Yanks on the 
Western front underwent their baptism of fire along- 
side Australian troops. Pershing's scrappers could 
have had no better model. Australia, having 
sent her boys to the war, intends seeing that 
they are well taken care of when they come back. 
She purposes repatriating all of them and re-establish- 
ing them in civil life at an estimated cost of 
$150,000,000. 

Canada's record is no less glorious than that of 
Australia. She has enlisted 552,000 men, and sent 
383,500 overseas. I guess that total includes the 
thousands of Yanks who joined the Canadian Army 
before we came into the war. The Canadians have 
fought in many of the bloodiest engagements in which 



76 Explaining the Britishers 

the British Army has taken part in France and 
Flanders. Up to the middle of this year Canadian 
casualties amounted to 159,084, including 43,279 killed 
in action or died of wounds or disease. Thirty Cana- 
dians have won the Victoria Cross. Over 200 
Canadian officers have been on duty in the United 
States as instructors. Like the Australians, the 
Canadians maintain a completely independent mili- 
tary organization. They have a wonderful Air 
Service of their own, including champions like 
Lieut. -Colonel Bishop, V.C. (72 Hun machines 
brought to earth), and during the past 3| years 
have sent into aviation a total of 14,000 men. 
Canada is becoming an important factor in ship- 
building and her output of munitions is of the greatest 
importance. She has produced nearly a billion 
dollars worth altogether. Canadian munition works 
turned out during 1917 and 1918, of some particular 
varieties of shells, 40 per cent of the entire needs of 
the British Army. 

Canada has come across with her money, as well 
as with her men and munitions. The Dominion 
Treasury has loaned to the Mother Country the sum 
of $46C,000,000 to assist in paying for munitions, 
and Canadian banks have loaned still another 
$100,000,000 for the same purpose. These are 
colossal achievements for a country whose population 
in 1911 (7,206,643) was not as large as Pennsylvania's 
(7,665, 111). We of the United States are proud of our 
great neighbor on the North. Her sons and daughters 
live on the same sort of soil that we inhabit and 



Ireland and the Colonies 11 

breathe the same invigorating air. The coasts of their 
vast Continent are washed by the identical waters 
that lash the shores of the United States. They have 
added fresh lustre to the North American name. 
Yanks in England are often mistaken for Canadians, 
and Canadians for Americans. Both of us chew 
gum, play baseball and have other tastes in common. 
The Britishers say that we do the same things to the 
English language, too. Well, I don't know how the 
Canucks feel about it ; but if I were an American 
soldier I would be mighty glad if anybody thought I 
belonged to the army that made itself immortal at 
Vimy Ridge in 1917, and this year, in the great 
battle of Amiens, accomplished even greater deeds. 
Read how the proud Commander-in-Chief of the 
Canadian Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur 
Currie — a 43-year-old giant — summarized the work of 
his men in front of Amiens : 

"On August 8 the Canadian Corps, to 
which was attached the 3rd Cavalry Division, 
the 4th Tank Brigade, the 5th Squadron R.A.F., 
attacked on a front of 7,500 yards. After a 
penetration of 22,000 yards the line to-night 
rests on a 10,000-yard frontage. Sixteen 
German divisions have been identified, of 
which four have been completely routed. 
Nearly 150 guns have been captured, while 
• over 1,000 machine-guns have fallen into our 
hands. Ten thousand prisoners have passed 
through our cages and casualty clearing sta- 



78 Explaining the Britishers 

tions, a number greatly in excess of our total 
casualties. Twenty-five towns and villages 
have been rescued from the clutch of the in- 
vaders, the Paris- Amiens railway has been 
freed from interference, and the danger of 
dividing the French and British Army has been 
dissipated." 
That's glory enough, to my way of thinking, to 
last Toronto and Winnipeg, Alberta and Saskatche- 
wan, Vancouver and Ottawa till the crack of doom. 

I wish I had the space to continue the story, in 
detail, of what the other British clans have done in the 
hour of the Motherland's peril. But it would only be a 
repetition on a proportionate scale of what Australia 
and Canada are doing. New Zealand, with a popula- 
tion of over a million, has sent about 100,000 
troops, white and coloured, to Freedom's battlefields. 
Together with the Australians, the New Zealanders 
formed the famous " Anzac " Corps at Gallipoli. 
They are mighty warriors, of the grim type of 
American plainsmen, and are feared and deeply 
respected on the German front. Many Maori tribes- 
men — the same fighting stuff as our black men — 
are in the N.Z. bunch. 

South Africa at the outbreak of the war 
gave the Germans one of their cruellest dis- 
appointments by raising a volunteer army of 58,000 
under the leadership of General Louis Botha — 
the Dutchman who less than fifteen years pre- 
viously was in arms against England on the same 
soil. Botha's army conquered the Kaiser's finest 



Ireland and the Colonies 79 

oversea colony, German South- West Africa, an area of 
322,500 square miles. Since then the South African 
army under another old Boer War enemy of England, 
General Smuts, has conquered German East Africa. 
In addition to kiboshing the Kaiser in Africa, the 
South Africans have sent nearly 10,000 men to 
Europe, including some of the finest fighting material 
which the British Empire affords. Little Newfound- 
land, the smallest British Colony, has done her 
full bit, too, and far more in men and money than 
might have been expected from a country of only 
250,000 inhabitants. From wherever the Union Jack 
flies, Britannia's sons have rallied to fight and die for 
her — from Malta, Fiji, Jamaica, Ceylon, Shanghai, 
the Bahamas, Barbados, British Guiana, Dominica, 
Trinidad, Bermuda. 

India, that priceless jewel in the British Crown, will 
never be forgiven in Berlin. Germany's fondest hopes 
of all were pinned on ' ' revolution ' ' in the vast Empire 
of the Maharajahs. Incipient sedition has long been 
smouldering in isolated parts of India, and the Kaiser 
implicitly believed that the embers of unrest would 
speedily burst forth into a furious blaze among the 
320,000,000 people of England's greatest Dependency. 
He and his German spies fanned those embers for 
years. What happened? In September, 1914, a 
stately armada of transports entered Marseilles har- 
bor, bearing 70,000 troops from India, under Indian 
officers, to fight for England and France against 
Germany ! Since then Indians have been in action 
with unfailing gallantry in almost every theatre of 



80 Explaining the Britishers 

war in which England has fought — in Mesopo- 
tamia, in Palestine, in Macedonia, on the Suez 
Canal and in East Africa. The great native 

Princes of India, who are nominally the subjects 
of the King of England in his capacity as Em- 
peror of India, have given freely of their vast fortunes 
for the British cause. By every means in their 
power they have urged their own native subjects to 
go forth in the Empire's cause. The Aga Khan, the 
head of the Mahomedans, called on all of his faith- 
ful to fight for England and himself volunteered to 
serve as a private in any Indian infantry regiment. 
The Grand Old Man of India, Lieutenant-General Sir 
Pertab Singh, has himself commanded Indian troops 
in France. 

So runs the Empire's story of glory since 1914. 
Historians will compile volumes about it some day. 
Poets will be inspired to sing of it in verse. All that 
concerns us to-day is to know that the British Em- 
pire has made good with a big G. The democratic 
system, under which these little islands govern five 
hundred million people of all colors, creeds and con- 
ditions, was tried and not found wanting. 



Chapter VII. 

HOW THE BRITISHERS ARE GOVERNED. 

THE British Empire is a free country. None freer 
exists anywhere on God's footstool. The 
Britishers boast that there is more freedom under their 
Union Jack than there is under our Stars and Stripes. 
We won't argue that point with them. I merely 
allude to it to make you understand that, although 
they have a King and a House of Lords, and Princes 
and Dukes and titles, and all that sort of thing, the 
Britishers look upon themselves as being in all respects 
as Democratic and as free a nation as the United 
States. I have already described Great Britain to you 
as a country with a President who is called a King. 
I cannot think of any better or truer way of explaining 
the British Monarchy. There is one big difference. 
That is, that the Britishers' Royal Chief Magistrate 
has not got nearly as much power as our American 
Presidents have. I suppose that is why the Britishers 
think that their little old country is freer than ours. 
At any rate, I guess a good many of you have been 
agreeably surprised to find how free the British 
atmosphere really is. Have you found the air around 



82 Explaining the Britishers 

your Rest Camps a bit different than the air you 
breathed in New England, the Mississippi Valley, the 
South- West, or along the Pacific Coast? Except for 
the unfamiliar kind of English you've heard — and the 
funny stunts of the British climate — would you ever 
realize that you were in England instead of back home 
in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Indiana, 
Minnesota or California ? You haven't seen any signs 
up reading: "The King Forbids'' this, that or the 
other thing, have you? You haven't seen the 
Tommies bowing and scraping in front of any Royal 
image, or speaking in awe-struck whispers about 
"His Majesty," have you? On your life, you have 
not. That's only done in Germany. It won't be done 
very much by the time you get there. Probably 
you've noticed that the British Army and Navy are 
called "His Majesty's Forces." The Government, 
too, is known as "His Majesty's Government." But, 
like the Monarchy itself, these things are only 
form. The Britisher loves form. In fact, he worships 
it. He knows just as well as you and I know that the 
Army and Navy are not " His Majesty's" Forces 
really. They are the armed forces of the British 
Nation — to-day they are the nation itself. But the 
Army and Navy have been termed " His Majesty's 
Forces" for a thousand years or more, and as the 
Britishers are very strong for the musty things of life, 
they cling to that description of their military and 
naval establishments. It was good enough for their 
great-great-grandfathers and it's good enough for 
them. 



How the British are Governed 83 



A lot of you by this time have memorized the first 
verse of the British National Anthem : 

God save our gracious King, 
Long live our noble King, 
God save the King. 
Send him victorious, 
Happy and glorious, 
Long to reign over us, 
God save the King." 

Now that's what the Britishers sing, and they 
always stand up when they sing it. Soldiers and 
sailors in uniform stand stiffly at the salute when the 
anthem is played or sung. Don't get the idea that 
they show these signs of respect in any spirit of 
cringing servility to a crowned monarch. The King 
of England doesn't expect that kind of respect from 
his subjects — who are called subjects, by the way, 
again out of sheer form. They are in fact citizens, 
just like you and me. If they were really his "sub- 
jects," he would have power of life and death over 
them. He does not possess any such power. A 
Britisher can only be put to death or deprived of his 
liberty after a fair trial. No ; " God Save the King " 
actually means " God Save Britain." God is asked 
to send the King "victorious," but what the Britisher 
means when he sings that prayer is that Britain be 
"sent victorious." He prays that the King may be 
kept "happy and glorious" and "long to reign over 
us," because the King is their accepted, even if not 
elected, Sovereign. They venerate the monarchal 



84 Explaining the Britishers 

tradition, which he represents. They want him 
saved ' ' not because he happens to be named 
Albert Edward or George or something else, but 
because he is the physical, personal embodiment of 
their rights and liberties under the crown which the 
reigning King wears by their consent and with their 
approval. 

You will ask me where the King " comes in " if 
he has no such power as our President wields. Well, 
there must be a head or a figurehead to every great 
concern, and a nation is the greatest of all concerns. 
The King heads the British concern. The nearest 
thing the Britishers have to our President, as the 
actual head of their national administration, is the 
Prime Minister. Government in Great Britain is party 
government as it is in the United States. The political 
party that gets the most votes at a " General Election 
— which is held about every five years for the purpose 
of electing members to the House of Commons (the 
British equivalent of our House of Representatives) — 
has the right to select one of its own members to be 
Prime Minister. If the Liberal Party gets a majority 
in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister will be 
a Liberal. If the Conservative Party obtains the 
majority, a Conservative is appointed Prime Minister. 
The Labor Party is now very strong in Great Britain, 
and some day, perhaps, it will have a majority in the 
House of Commons. Then a Labor leader will be 
called to the Prime Ministership. Whoever becomes 
Prime Minister selects the members of his own 
administration, just as the newly-elected President 



How the British are Governed 85 



of the United States picks out his own Cabinet. The 
King nominally asks So-and-So to be Prime Minister 
and to compose a Government. But that is only a 
bluff. It is "form" again. The political party that 
the voters of the country have placed in power in Par- 
liament (the House of Commons) decides who shall 
be Prime Minister, and the King sends for him and 
"appoints" him. Do you get that? The Prime 
Minister of Great Britain, in other words, is every 
bit as much " the people's choice " as is the President 
of the United States. 

But the Prime Minister does not become the ruler 
of the country. Parliament is the ruler. The 
"P.M." holds office only by the will and consent of 
Parliament. They vote him in and they can vote him 
out. If he brings in a Bill for the passage of some 
new law, and the House of Commons rejects it — in 
other words, turns the Prime Minister down — he and 
his Government have to appeal to the country. A 
new election is necessary. If the country supports 
him and sends back to Parliament a House of Com- 
mons with a majority in favor of the Prime Minister, 
he retains office. Otherwise, he is out of a job, and 
the leader of the party to which the country has given 
a majority succeeds him as head of the Government. 

There may be a newly-elected Parliament in 
England before 1918 is over, as there is a good deal 
of talk at the moment of a General Election. Then, 
once again, according to tradition, the King will 
formally "open" Parliament. He will ride from 
Buckingham Palace to the House of Lords and there 



86 Explaining the Britishers 



deliver a so-called " Speech from the Throne." It 
will use old-fashioned expressions like " My Govern- 
ment," "My Army," "My Navy," "My People," 
and other similar phrases. Nobody in Britain will get 
angry when he reads them next day in the newspaper. 
The King will have used those expressions because 
they are part and parcel of the Royal System which 
the Britishers tolerate and venerate. That's all. The 
King's venerable language will not have altered the 
fact that through their Parliament the British people 
rule. 

You will notice that I said that the King opens 
Parliament in the House of Lords. He does not go to 
the House of Commons — where the elected repre- 
sentatives of the people sit and rule. The House of 
Lords prior to 1911 had a great deal more power than 
it now possesses. It is made up mostly of men who 
sit there by right of heredity — because they are the 
sons of their fathers. When the Duke of Norfolk or the 
Duke of Sutherland or the Duke of Portland dies, his 
eldest son becomes the Duke of that name and takes 
his late father's place in the House of Lords, or Upper 
House, as it is sometimes called. So with the eldest 
sons (or other heirs) of Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, 
and plain Lords. The "Parliament Act of 1911" 
made certain changes in the rights and privileges of 
the House of Lords. Their effect was to leave the 
elected House of Commons practically the boss of 
the show. The House of Lords, in other words, is 
now more or less ornamental as far as the real govern- 
ment of Great Britain is concerned. 



How the British are Governed 87 

Having tried, as simply as I could, to tell you 
what the British governing system is, I'll give you 
a little of the personal side of it. The Britishers 
couldn't have done the big things they have put 
across during the past four years if they didn't have 
Big Men at the helm. First of all, their King has 
proved himself to be a brick. Without thrusting him- 
self into the spot-light — that would have been neither 
Kingly, according to British tradition, nor British at 
all, because it would not have been "reserve"- — 
George V., like the humblest of his people, has played 
the game. He sent his eldest son, the Prince of 
Wales, to the front as a soldier, and the lad, who is 
24, has proved himself to be an intelligent, efficient 
young officer, popular with the rank and file and in 
every respect a fine type of the Briton of his age and 
class. The King's second sons, Prince Albert and 
Prince Henry, who are aged 23 and 18, respectively, 
followed their father's footsteps and entered the 
Navy, though Prince Albert is now in aviation. 
What King George has done in the war has been 
to set his people a high example of patriotism 
and hard work. He (and the Queen, too) has been 
indefatigable in every sort of activity designed to fire 
the enthusiasm of the people in getting on with and 
winning the war. The King visits the wounded in 
hospital, mingles with the workers in the munition 
factories, goes to the Front in France periodically 
to sojourn- among the soldiers in the field, inspects 
the Grand Fleet from time to time — with the eye of 
an expert sailor, for that is the King's profession — 



88 Explaining the Britishers 

and in every way associates himself with the stirring 
life and'times of the nation at this great hour. I don't 
suppose there is a man in all England who works 
harder at his job than the King does. He has 
to see an enormous number of important people, both 
British and foreign. He has to sign hundreds of docu- 
ments daily. His advice, under the British Constitu- 
tion, has to be sought and secured on countless occa- 
sions. He himself instituted the custom of conferring 
honors, medals, decorations and titles for war service 
publicly instead of privately within the walls of 
Buckingham Palace. He has tried in every way to 
be, and succeeded in being, a People's King. 

He likes Americans — enjoys our breezy way of 
doing and saying things. Here's a story the King 
himself tells. Some time ago he had an American 
General at lunch. Conversation turned on the subject 
of what the world would be like after the war. " How 
do you think things will be ? ' ' the King asked our 
General. "Well, I don't know," replied the 
American, ' but I'm dead sure of one thing — there'll 
be a lot of German talked in Hell!" The King liked 
that. He liked it because it was a free and easy 
come-back. He doesn't care much for side, either 
in himself or in others. He visited an American 
battleship in Irish waters last Summer and shovelled 
coal into the furnace. When the stokers marvelled at 
his skill, the King said: "Oh, that used to be one 
of my jobs when I was in the Navy." And, of course, 
King George has a strong claim on our affections 
because he's a baseball fan. 



How the British are Governed 89 

The Prime Minister of England is David Lloyd 
George. He's a Welshman and the kind of man 
we honor in America, because he is self-made. He 
was a poor boy, with none of the advantages of 
wealth, birth or position. He had nerve, ability, 
courage and a silver tongue, and those qualities made 
him Prime Minister in December, 1916. Lloyd George 
was a live wire in British politics long before that. In 
1900, when I first came to this country, he was only 
a private Member of Parliament, but had already 
won a reputation for pugnacity. He was Chancellor 
of the Exchequer (Secretary of the Treasury) when 
war broke out and in that capacity rendered important 
service in mobilizing the finances of Great Britain. 
Germany hated him cordially for several years before 
1914 because, when the Kaiser got gay in Morocco 
in 1911 and tried to bully France, it was a speech by 
Lloyd George that brought Germany to her senses 
and prevented war. In those critical hours in August, 
1914, when there were divisions in the British Cabinet 
on the question of intervention in the war, Lloyd 
George was one of the men who advocated from the 
very first that Britain should go in. A man of pacific 
tendencies, a Democrat who believed in peace, 
Lloyd George wanted only peace with honor. He 
knew that Britain could not have that kind of peace if 
she stayed out. In 1915, when Britain came to the 
conclusion that a special Ministry of Munitions had 
to be created for the production of guns and shells 
on a gigantic scale, Lloyd George was put in charge 
of it. It was the right place for a man of his driving 



90 Explaining the Britishers 

power and organizing skill, and he will have a great 
niche in the history of the war for what he accom- 
plished as Munitions Minister. Lloyd George is pre- 
cisely the sort of public man who would go down 
well in the United States. If he had been born there, 
I think it would be a hard job to keep him out 
of the White House, for he is a natural leader of 
wonderful magnetism. There is a good deal of the 
Teddy Roosevelt about him. One of Lloyd George's 
heroes is Abraham Lincoln, and his hobby is golf. 

I wish I had the space to tell in detail of a lot of 
the other Big Men of Britain. Lord Kitchener, who 
organized the great Volunteer Army of 1914-15, 
accomplished a work that will have high place in 
the annals of war. Fortunately, his task was, for the 
most part, already accomplished when he was 
drowned in a British man-of-war while on his way to 
Russia in 1916. Lord French, who commanded the 
old British Army in France for the first year and a 
half of the war, and is now Viceroy of Ireland, en- 
hanced a military reputation which he won in South 
Africa in 1 899- 1 900- 1 90 1 . Sir Douglas Haig, the pre- 
sent British Commander-in-Chief in France, is a fine 
specimen of the modern British soldier and, as he has 
only recently proved, a strategist of no mean calibre. 
Marshal Foch, our great French Generalissimo, thinks 
very highly of Haig. 

In Admiral Beatty the British Navy has a Com- 
mander-in-Chief of the bulldog temperament that the 
hour calls for. When he got his teeth into the German 
Fleet at Jutland in May, 1916, he never let go until 



How the British are Governed 91 

the Germans, having had their fill of the fray, scam- 
pered back to their ports, where they've been laid up 
for repairs ever since. Some people said Beatty was 
too eager at Jutland — took too many risks. Well, 
he fought in accordance with the British Navy's 
tradition, which is to pound hell out of the enemy 
whenever the chance is given, and to keep on 
pounding as long as you can. Admiral Beatty is 
only 47 years old. He is married to a charming 
American lady, the daughter of the late Marshall 
Field, of Chicago. 

The naval service is rightly a service in which 
young blood predominates. In Sir Eric Geddes, First 
Lord of the Admiralty — or what we could call 
Secretary of the Navy — Britain has another man after 
our own heart, for he is not only youthful (42), but 
entirely self-made. He began life as a railway porter, 
and learned the railway business — which is his occu- 
pation in civil life — in our Southern States, where 
he spent several years lumbering and working for 
the B. & O. 

Winston Churchill, who is now responsible for the 
colossal work of the Ministry of Munitions, is half- 
American, his mother having been a Miss Jennie 
Jerome, of New York. He, too, enjoys the advantage 
of youthful energy, being just 44. There is also a 
North American touch about Bonar Law, who is Lloyd 
George's right hand man in the conduct of the war 
and is now in charge of Treasury and financial 
matters as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Law was 
born in Canada — in New Brunswick. Lord Beaver- 



92 Explaining the Britishers 

brook, the hustling young British Minister of 
Information (aged 39), is also a Canadian and 
was born in the same town as Bonar Law. 
Lord NorthclifFe, who conducts British propaganda 
in Enemy Countries and is Germany's best-hated 
Britisher, is well known in the U.S.A., which 
he admires intensely and knows more intimately, 
probably, than any living Britisher. Another 
prominent member of Lloyd George's Administra- 
tion is Sir Albert Stanley, President of the Board 
of Trade (the Government's business department, 
which controls railways, mines, shipping and all 
industrial affairs). He, too, may be described as 
"part Yank," as his entire business training, 
in electric transportation matters, was gained in the 
U.S.A. He keeps up the youthful tradition of 
Britain's War Government, for he is only 43. 

No list of the Big Men of the war era would 
be complete without the name of Lord Reading, 
British Ambassador to the United States. The 
Earl of Reading, to given him his full title, is 
undoubtedly one of the most remarkable Englishmen 
alive. He is a lawyer by profession, and when he 
was in private life and practiced under his own name 
of Rufus Isaacs, he was the most skilful man at the 
bar — the kind that litigants always preferred to have 
for them rather than against them. Early in the war he 
was Attorney-General and then became Lord Chief 
Justice, which is the blue ribbon of the legal profes- 
sion in this country. The Government sent Lord 
Reading to the United States on several important war 



Hoit; the British are Governed 93 



missions, principally in connection with finance, and 
he so endeared himself to the American people that 
he was .the logical man for the Ambassadorship when 
it became vacant in 1918. No man has done more 
during the war to enable Britishers and Americans 
to get together than Reading. 

The working classes of Great Britain have to-day 
the largest share in the Government that Labor in any 
country ever possessed. George N. Barnes (a 
mechanic by trade) is a member of the War Cabinet. 
George "H. Roberts, a printer, is Minister of Labor. 
J. R. Clynes, a cotton operative, is^Food Minister. 
John Hodge, who began life as an iron puddler, is 
Minister of Pensions. William Brace, a coal miner, 
is Under Secretary for Home Affairs and one of the 
most eloquent orators in England besides. 

And, before I forget it, the Britishers are hence- 
forth to be governed, in part, by their women. Six 
millions of them — provided they're willing to 'fess up 
that they're 30 years old — will vote in future. Their 
great work in the war won for the women the right 
to a hand in the steering of the British ship of state. 



Chapter VIII. 
THE BULLDOG BREED. 

THERE is one thing about the Britisher that the 
Germans cannot understand. He never knows 
when he is licked. That is why men of the British 
race have come to be known as " the bulldog breed." 
They had that reputation long before this war, but 
have clinched their title to it a thousand-fold during 
the past four years. Indeed, they would have 
deserved it on their record of the spring and summer 
of 1918 alone. Who would have dared to imagine 
that the British Army that was battered back through 
the Somme valley in March and April would so 
fully recover its punch in August and September 
that it would be smashing the " Hindenburg Line " ? 
Tommy Atkins has done what Jim Jeffries couldn't 
do. He "came back." One of Napoleon's marshals 
said that the right kind of an army was the army that 
is most dangerous when the enemy thinks it is broken. 
That is precisely what the British Army made of itself, 
after passing through the bitter waters of defeat for 
four weary, disheartening years. It's the bulldog way. 
We Yanks have for the most part formed our 
ideas of the Britisher from the stage Englishman. I 
used to think that all Britishers were Cissy-like Lords 
with monocles, checked trousers, chesty manners, and 



The Bulldog Breed 95 

a haw-haw attitude toward their humbler fellow- 
creatures such as mere Americans. I imagine that a 
good many of you may have been under the impres- 
sion that nobody counts in the British Army unless he 
is of blue blood, with Dukes and Duchesses for his 
relations, and a wad of money in the bank. Also, 1 
suppose, you have pictured to yourselves a British 
Army bossed and run by high and mighty Englishmen 
lording it over their menial subordinates. Well, I can 
clear your minds up about that. I have been at the 
British front twice during the war. My lasting im- 
pression on both occasions was of the good-fellowship 
existing between officers and men. There are, of 
course, "class distinctions" in Britain — just as there 
are in the United States, though we don't like to 
admit it. But these distinctions are levelled on the 
battlefield. There a man is just a man. What counts 
is what he is, not what his father is or his grandfather 
was. He has the same chance to make good that 
a Duke's son has. You'll know the spirit I'm trying 
to describe when I tell you that a captain (Pollock 
of the East Yorks, son of a knight who is a rich 
lawyer) was killed the other day while saving his 
soldier servant. 

Let me give you some more samples of what I 
mean. When the war broke out 400,000 coal miners 
volunteered from England, Scotland and Wales. 
One cf them was a man named Godfrey Jones, 
who began life as a pit-boy at the Ebbw Vale 
colliery in Wales. Joining as a private in September, 
1914, Jones was speedily promoted corporal, then 



96 Explaining the Britishers 

sergeant-major, and finally won his lieutenancy. On 
the Salonica front (in Greece) he conducted himself 
with such gallantry that he was promoted captain, 
won the Distinguished Service Order, and was later 
given the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Now the miner 
of 1914 has been recommended for a Brigadier- 
Generalship ! Jones is only 36 years old. 

Take the case of John Ward. Ward by trade is 
what they call in England a navvy — about the most 
humble class of working-man, the kind that digs 
sewers and that sort of thing. He was a Labor re- 
presentative in Parliament when the war began. He 
went out among his fellow-navvies, raised five bat- 
talions of Volunteers, and became their colonel. His 
lads were in a torpedoed transport, on their way to 
one of Britain's far-off battlefields, and faced danger 
and imminent drowning for hours before relief came 
up. Wards navvy- warriors spent their time singing 
"Rule, Britannia" and "Are We Downhearted? 
NO!" 

In August, 1914, a young man named James W. 
Watkins, son of a stationmaster, was a ticket-seller 
on the Midland Railway. Having meantime won the 
Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, 
Watkins is to-day a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Lan- 
cashire Fusiliers — one of the characteristically de- 
mocratic romances of the war. 

An equally remarkable career is that of J. P. 
Pitts, of the King's (Liverpool) Regiment. A few years 
ago he was a band-boy in the Bedfordshire Regiment, 
of humble origin, without pull of any kind. With 




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The Bulldog Breed 97 

nothing in his favour except the bulldog spirit, Pitts, 
who was at Mons, won the Military Cross, and is 
to-day, at 25, a Lieutenant-Colonel. 

Major Charles Clark, of the Royal Field Artillery, 
who was killed in action in April, 1918, was a farm- 
hand before the war. Four cotton-mill lads who left 
work in 1914 and 1915 to join the Army have won 
commissions in the field. An able seaman named 
Robert William Fox, of the Royal Naval Division, has 
become a Second Lieutenant. There have, of course, 
been thousands of cases of men of the humblest 
origin who have been given commissions after serving 
in the ranks. Lads who were office-boys in 1914 
are Lieutenants now. 

One of the most amazing proofs of the demo- 
cratic atmosphere of the Army is Major-General John 
Monash, the Commander of the superb Australian 
Army Corps in France. He is a typical illustration 
of the fact that neither birth, creed nor position in 
life cuts any ice whatever as far as a British military 
career is concerned. When the war broke out, 
Monash, who is a Jew, was a civil engineer in Mel- 
bourne. To-day he is Commander-in-Chief of one of 
the finest armies the world has ever seen. Perhaps 
I might mention in passing that Lord Reading, 
British Ambassador at Washington, is also a Jew and 
Lord Chief Justice of England besides. Jews are 
often members of the British Cabinet. 

The Royal Air Force of Britain — the great 
"R.A.F.," which is doing as much to win the war, I 
suppose, as any other single branch — overflows with 

4 



98 Explaining the Britishers 

examples of young fellows who have come to the top 
from humble origins. The British air champion, when 
he was killed in an accident this summer, was James 
Byford McCudden, a youngster of 23. Before the war 
McCudden was an air-mechanic. He became a pilot 
— the most expert that the Army produced — and when 
he met his fate he was a major, with a record of 54 
Huns brought down. One of his last feats was 
to lay low the German air crack, Flight-Lieutenant 
Voss. 

No less famous than McCudden was Captain 
Albert Ball, a Nottingham boy who was 16 years old 
when war broke out and barely 20 when he was killed 
in action. He had brought down 42 Germans in air 
fights. The captain's brother, also a flying-man of 
rare courage and skill, is a prisoner in Germany. 

I have given you a few examples, at random from 
among many, of how the so-called common people 
of Britain have done their bit and won through to 
high rank on merit. Don't think that it is only the 
lower and middle classes of Britishers who have 
achieved Death and Glory. I want particularly to rid 
your mind of such a notion, for it is one of the lies that 
Germany has spread abroad with persistent male- 
volence. No class of Britisher has done more nobly 
in the war than the highest class of British society. 
The first man to win the Victoria Cross was Captain 
Francis Grenfell, of the 9th Lancers, the son of Lord 
Desborough. Grenfell was one of the "Old Con- 
temptibles," the little British Army that held up the 
German plunge through Belgium in the first three 



The Bulldog Breed 99 

weeks of the war. His V.C. was granted for helping 
to save the guns of a Royal Field Artillery battery. 
Afterwards Grenfell and his brother were killed in 
action. 

Ten Peers — heads of great noble families — have 
fallen fighting, including four Earls and six Barons, 
all members of the House of Lords. In addition to 
Peers who have lost their lives on the field of battle, 
sixty heirs to peerages have made the Great Sacrifice. 
Through their deaths twelve peerages have become 
extinct, as there were no heirs to the titles they held. 
Thus came to an end, for instance, the Marquisate 
of Lincolnshire, the Earldom of St. Aldwyn, and the 
Viscountcy of Buxton. 

Many of the foremost families of the country have 
lost sons. Mr. Asquith, while Prime Minister, had 
to mourn the death of his heir, Raymond Asquith, 
a lawyer of talent and fine promise. Mr. Bonar 
Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has lost one son 
killed ; another is a prisoner in the enemy's hands. 
The Hon. Neil Primrose, youngest son of the Earl of 
Rosebery, a former Prime Minister, fell in this year's 
fighting in Palestine alongside another scion of the 
aristocracy, Major Evelyn Rothschild of the celebrated 
banking family. A grandson of the famous Victorian 
statesman, William E. Gladstone, met a hero's death. 
The two elder sons of Lord Rothermere (a brother 
of Lord Northcliffe) have fallen. The Earl of Denbigh 
has lost two sons. Any number of British families 
have lost two members Many have given three, and 
there are several cases of four boys belonging to the 

4 a 



100 Explaining the Britishers 

same family who have "gone West.'' All were 
sacrificed in the spirit in which the Widow Bixby of 
Massachusetts gave her five sons for the Union in our 
Civil War — the mother to whom our sainted Lincoln 
wrote that famous and beautiful letter, acclaiming 
the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid 
so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom." 

No reference to the bulldog breed can be complete 
without a passing tribute to the mothers, wives, 
daughters, sisters and sweethearts of Britain. How 
they face, dry-eyed, year after year, the losses of 
their men is one of the marvels of Britain's great era. 
I suppose it is due to that "reserve'' and poise on 
which the British race so prides itself. Whatever it 
is that enables British women to stand the strain of 
war as they do, it is glorious. They are setting our 
mothers and wives, our sisters and sweethearts, a 
great and inspiring example. 

How can I begin to tell in deserving terms of the 
countless acts of bravery which the boys and men 
of the bulldog breed have performed? The highest 
British distinction for gallantry before the foe is the 
Victoria Cross — "For Valor." It was founded by 
and named after Queen Victoria in 1856. It is a 
Maltese cross of metal made from Russian cannon 
taken during the Crimean war at Sebastopol. When 
awarded to soldiers, the V.C. has a crimson ribbon ; 
when given to sailors, it has a dark blue ribbon. In 
the four years up to August, 1918, nearly 500 
Victoria Crosses had been awarded. They do not 



The Bulldog Breed 101 



even remotely begin, of course, to exhaust the deeds 
of unflinching courage that the men of the British 
Army and Navy have to their immortal credit. The 
thousands who received the Military Cross, the Dis- 
tinguished Service Order, or medals of various grades, 
were just as heroic, just as ready to face danger and 
death, as the gallant 500 who won the Victoria Cross. 

The Victoria Cross is a thoroughly democratic 
institution. The lowest man in the ranks or the ship 
can aspire to it. An Irish hod-carrier has just as much 
chance to win it as an English Duke's son. I've been 
skimming over the V.C. roll of honor, and my eye 
catches names like Boyle, Hogan, McFadzean, 
O'Sullivan, O'Meara, and O'Leary. Several Jews 
have been awarded the prized badge of British 
courage. Even the fact that a man has " done time " 
does not bar him from a V.C, if he deserves it. One 
of the finest V.C. deeds was accomplished by an ex- 
convict, who was serving in the trenches alongside 
his former prison guards. By far the largest number 
of men in the proud list are (or were — for many have 
been killed since they won the honor or were awarded 
it after death) privates. All branches — infantry, 
artillery, cavalry, tanks, aircraft, submarines, de- 
stroyers — are represented. Indians, Australians, 
Canadians and New Zealanders are among the 
heroes, for the British bulldog breed seems to mani- 
fest itself regardless of calling, rank, origin or color. 

Perhaps you would like to know exactly the kind 
of stuff that wins the Victoria Cross. Here are a few 
awards chosen indiscriminately : 



102 Explaining the Britishers 

Acton, Private Abraham, 2nd Batt. Border 
Regiment. For conspicuous bravery at Cuinchy 
on December 21, 1914, at Rouges Bancs, in 
voluntarily going from his trench and rescuing 
a wounded man who had been lying exposed 
against the enemy's trenches for seventy-five 
hours, and on the same day again leaving his 
rench voluntarily, under heavy fire, to bring 
into cover another wounded man. He and 
Private James Smith, V.C., were under fire for 
sixty minutes whilst conveying the wounded 
men into safety. 

Boyle, Lieutenant-Commander Edward C, 
Royal Navy. For most conspicuous bravery, 
in command of submarine E 1 4, when he dived 
his vessel under the enemy's minefields and 
entered the Sea of Marmora on April 27, 1915. 
In spite of great navigational difficulties from 
strong currents, of the continual neighbourhood 
of hostile patrols, and of the hourly danger of 
attack from the enemy, he continued to operate 
in the narrow waters of the Straits, and 
succeeded in sinking two Turkish gunboats and 
one large military transport. 

Silton, Lance-Sergeant Ellis Welwood, late 
Canadian Infantry Batt. For most conspicuous 
bravery and devotion to duty. During the 
attack in enemy trenches Sergeant Sifton's com- 
pany was held up by machine-gun fire which 
inflicted many casualties. Having located the 
gun, he charged it single-handed, killing all the 
crew. A small enemy party advanced down 
the trench, but he succeeded in keeping these 
off till our men had gained the position. In 
carrying out this gallant act he was killed, but 
his conspicuous valor undoubtedly saved 
many lives and contributed largely to the 
success of the operation. 



The Bulldog Breed 103 

Mariner, Private William, 2nd Batt. King's 
Royal Rifle Corps. During a violent thunder- 
storm on the night of May 22, 1915, he left his 
trench near Cambrin, and crept out through 
the German wire entanglements till he reached 
the emplacement of a German machine gun 
which had been damaging our parapets and 
hindering our working parties. After climbing 
on the top of the German parapet he threw a 
bomb in under the roof of the gun emplace- 
ment and heard some groaning and the enemy 
running away. After about a quarter of an 
hour he heard some of them coming back 
again, and climbed up on the other side of the 
emplacement and threw another bomb among 
them left-handed. He then lay still while the 
Germans opened a heavy fire on the wire en- 
tanglements behind him, and it was only after 
about an hour that he was able to crawl back 
to his own trench. 

Warneford, Flight Sub-Lieutenant, late 
Royal Flying Corps. For destroying single- 
handed the first German Zeppelin brought to 
grief in the war. Afterwards, although forced 
to descend on enemy soil, he succeeded in 
flying back safely. (Since killed.) 

Maling, Temporary Lieutenant George 
Allan, M.B., Royal Army Medical Corps. For 
most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty 
during the heavy fighting near Fauquissart on 
September 25, 1915. Lieutenant Maling 
worked incessantly with untiring energy from 
6.15 a.m. on the 25th till 8 a.m. on the 26th, 
collecting and treating in the open under heavy 
shell fire more than 300 men. At about 11 a.m. 
on the 25th he was flung down and temporarily 



104 Explaining the Britishers - 

stunned by the bursting of a large high- 
explosive shell, which wounded his only 
assistant and killed several of his patients. A 
second shell soon after covered him and his 
instruments with debris, but his high courage 
and zeal never failed him, and he continued 
iiis gallant work single-handed. 

Addison, Rev. W. R. F., Temporary Chap- 
lain to the Forces, 4th CI., Army Chaplains' 
Department. He carried a wounded man to 
the cover of a trench, and assisted several 
others to the same cover, after binding up their 
wounds under heavy rifle and machine-gun 
fire. In addition to these unaided efforts, by 
his splendid example and utter disregard of 
personal danger, he encouraged the stretcher- 
bearers to go forward under heavy fire and col- 
lect the wounded. 

Bingham, Comr. the Hon. Edward S. B. 
(Prisoner of War in Germany). For extremely 
gallant way in which he led his division in their 
attack, first on enemy destroyers and then on 
their battle-cruisers. He finally sighted the 
enemy battle-fleet, and, followed by the one 
remaining destroyer of his division (Nicator), 
with dauntless courage he closed to within 
3,000 yards of the enemy in order to attain a 
favourable position for firing his torpedoes. 
While making this attack Nestor and Nicator 
were under concentrated fire of the secondary 
batteries of the High Sea Fleet. Nestor was 
subsequently sunk. 

Laidlaw, Piper Daniel, 7th King's Own 
Scottish Borderers. For most conspicuous 
bravery prior to an assault on German trenches 
near Loos and Hill 70 on September 25, 1915. 



The Bulldog Breed 105 



During the worst of the bombardment, when 
the attack was about to commence, Piper Laid- 
law, seeing that his company was somewhat 
shaken from the effects of gas, with absolute 
coolness and disregard of danger mounted the 
parapet, marched up and down, and played his 
company out of the trench. The effect of his 
splendid example was immediate and the com- 
pany dashed out to the assault, Piper Laidlaw 
continued playing his pipes till he was 
wounded. 

Frickleton, Lance-Corporal ' Samuel, New 
Zealand Infantry. For most conspicuous 
bravery and determination when with attacking 
troops, which came under heavy fire and were 
checked. Although slightly wounded, Corporal 
Frickleton dashed forward at the head of his 
section, pushed into our barrage, and per- 
sonally destroyed with bombs an enemy 
machine-gun and crew which was causing 
heavy casualties. He then attacked a second 
gun, killing the whole of the crew of twelve. 
By the destruction of these two guns he un- 
doubtedly saved his own and other units from 
very severe casualties, and his magnificent 
courage and gallantry ensured the capture of 
the objective. During the consolidation of the 
position he received a second severe wound. 
He set throughout a great example of heroism. 

McFadzean, Private W. F., late Royal 
Irish Rifles. While in a concentration trench 
and opening a box of bombs for distribution 
prior to an attack, the box slipped down into 
the trench, which was crowded with men, and 
two of the safety pins fell out. Private 
McFadzean, instantly realizing the danger to 



106 Explaining the Britishers 

his comrades, with heroic courage threw him- 
self on the top of the bombs. The bombs 
exploded, blowing him to pieces, but only one 
other man was injured. He well knew his 
danger, being himself a bomber, but without a 
moment's hesitation he gave his life for his 
comrades. 

Robinson, Lieutenant William Leefe, Wor- 
cester Regiment and Royal Flying Corps. For 
most conspicuous bravery. He attacked an 
enemy airship trying to bomb London under 
circumstances of great difficulty and danger, 
and sent it crashing to the ground as a flaming 
wreck. He had been in the air for more than 
two hours, and had previously attacked another 
airship during his flight. 

Jackson, Private W., Australian Infantry. 
On the return from a successful raid several 
members of the raiding party were seriously 
wounded in "No Man's Land" by shell fire. 
Private Jackson got back safely, and, after 
handing over a prisoner whom he had brought 
in, immediately went out again under very 
heavy shell fire and assisted in bringing in a 
wounded man. He then went out again, and 
with a sergeant was bringing in another 
wounded man, when his arm was blown off by 
a shell and the sergeant was rendered un- 
conscious. 

For gallantry and devotion to duty in the second 
blocking operation in Ostend harbor on May 9-10, 
1918, when the old warship " Vindictive " was sunk, 
the following awards of the Victoria Cross were 
announced : — 

Lieutenant-Commander Geoffrey Heneage 
Drummond, R.N.V.R. Volunteered for rescue 



The Bulldog Breed 107 



work in command of M.L. 254. Although 
severely wounded in three places, he remained 
on the bridge and navigated his vessel, seriously 
damaged by shell-fire, alongside Vindictive 
and took off 2 officers and 38 men, some of 
whom were killed and many wounded while 
embarking. He backed his vessels out clear of 
the piers before sinking exhausted from his 
wounds. 

Lieut. -Commander Roland Bourke, D.S.O., 
R.N.V.R. After M.L. 254 had backed out of 
the harbor he, in command of M.L. 276, made 
a further search of Vindictive, but finding no 
one, withdrew. Hearing cries in the water, he 
again entered the harbor, and after a pro- 
longed search found Lieut. Sir John Alleyne 
and two men, all badly wounded, clinging to 
an upended skiff and rescued them. All the 
time the motor-launch was under heavy fire at 
close range, being hit in 55 places. 

Lieut. Victor A. C. Crutchley, D.S.C., R.N. 
He was in Brilliant in the unsuccessful attempt 
to block Ostend on April 22-23 and at once 
volunteered for the second effort. He was 1st 
Lieutenant in Vindictive, and when his com- 
manding officer was killed and the second in 
command severely wounded, he took com- 
mand. He did not leave Vindictive until he 
had made a thorough search with an electric 
torch for survivors under heavy fire. He took 
command of M.L. 254 when Lieutenant 
Drummond sank exhausted from his wounds. 
Only by dint of baling with buckets did Lieut. 
Crutchley and the unwounded keep the launch 
afloat until picked up. 



108 Explaining the Britishers 

The great stunts that won these sixteen V.C.s are 
typical of the bulldog spirit. The other 480 odd differ 
from them only in detail. All were deeds of mighty 
valor. But they will afford you a graphic idea, I 
hope, of the stuff that the fighting Britisher is made of. 

The war has not produced many great poems. A 
sonnet written by an Englishman, Major Maurice 
Baring, in honor of his friend and comrade, Julian 
Grenfell, himself a poet, who followed his V.C. 
brother Francis to a hero's death in France, is the 
best I have seen. It sings of the bulldog breed : 

*' Because of you we will be glad and gay, 
Remembering you, we will be brave and strong, 
And hail the advent of each dangerous day 
And meet the last adventure with a song. 
And as you proudly gave your jewelled gift, 
We'll give our lesser offering with a smile, 
Nor falter on that path where, all too swift, 
You led the way and leapt the golden stile. 
Whether new paths, new heights to climb you find, 
Or gallop through the unfooted asphodel, 
We know you know we shall not lag behind 
Nor halt to waste a moment on a fear. 
And you will speed us onward with a cheer 
And wave beyond the stars that all is well.' 



Chapter IX. 
THE REAL BRITISHER. 

THE preceding pages of this booklet have been 
devoted to an explanation of what the Britishers 
have accomplished during the war. I would like to 
make this concluding chapter a heart-to-heart talk on 
the subject of the Britisher as he really is. 

To begin with, he is not at all what he seems to 
be on first acquaintance, namely, a chilly proposition. 
Like a foreign language, he requires to be studied, 
and studied carefully. I've been studying him for 
nearly twenty years and I'm just commencing to 
understand him. He is dawning on me for what he 
is — a regular fellow, a white man, and one of our 
kind. It won't take you twenty years to know him. 
The war has made a lot of changes in him and he 
thaws faster than he used to. 

The Britishers and the Americans belong to the 
same English-speaking race, even though we don't 
say " raw-ther " when we mean rather. Both of us 
are Democratic to the core, too. That's why we're 
on the same side in this war. Sure. But otherwise 
most of our traits, habits, impulses and ordinary views 
about things are as different as day from night. That 
is not quite correct. They only seem different, for it 
is my experience that when Britishers and Yanks get 
together and thrash things out, they find that their 



I 1 Explaining the Britishers 

notions about life aren't as far apart as they appeared 
to be. We discover that we only look at life through 
spectacles of different colors. Our tastes and ideals 
are identical. All we do is to gratify the tastes and 
pursue the ideals in our own ways. If a Britisher 
steps on you by mistake, he says, "Sorry." A Yank 
says, "Beg your pardon." What each means is that 
he wishes he hadn't done it. They put it differently ; 
that's all. When you took your girl out for the last 
time before leaving the U.S.A., she probably told you 
that she had had a "bully" evening. The first girl 
you took out in England, I'll bet, assured you that 
you had given her a "ripping" time. But your Yank 
girl and your British girl meant precisely the same 
thing. 

The Britishers' English differs from Yank English 
all along the line, but that doesn't signify that it is bad 
English. After all, the language belongs to them. 
They saw it first. They do with it what tlhey please ; 
and we do to it what we please. Take their railroad 
lingo. To begin with, " there ain't no such animal" 
as a railroad " in this country. They've only got 
"railways." They "shunt" their trains. We 
"sidetrack" ours. By a "depot" the Britisher means 
a place where stuff is stored. By "depot" we mean 
the place we go to or come from when travelling by 
rail. Britishers " book places." If they talked our 
language, they'd " reserve accommodations." And 
they call conductors and brakesmen "guards." 

So it is with the thousand and one things in which 
our respective characteristics differ. Americans, for 



The Real Britisher 1 1 1 

instance, are hail-fellow-well-met sort of people. 
When we slap a man on the back as a welcome, we 
mean it. Were mighty glad to see him. We let 
him know it by the effusiveness of our greeting, by 
the warmth of our hand-clasp — and usually by a slap 
on the back. These being our emotions, we display 
them. We don't hide them away as if we were 
ashamed of them. It's our way. The Britisher's way 
is different. He seldom slaps you on the back. If 
he is meeting you for the first time, he never dpes. 
His welcome is polite, but never effusive. In the grip 
of his hand there is courtesy rather than cordiality. 
You do not get the glad hand from a Britisher till he 
is sure that you deserve it. Once you've proved that 
you have a right to his friendship, you get in full 
measure. 

I often wonder what it is that makes the Britisher 
act like an iceberg. He is not an iceberg, but he 
likes to make you think he is. You Yanks in khaki 
are talked to, I guess, in British railv/ay trains by 
natives who happen to be your fellow-passengers. 
But American civilians like myself might travel the 
whole length of the British Isles in a train and never 
have a Britisher open his head to us except to inquire, 
politely, if we object to his keeping the window open. 
I can forgive a Britisher anything, by the way, except 
his ungovernable passion for open windows in a 
railway-car even though the temperature outside be 
Arctic I like fresh air, all right, but I go outdoors 
when I want it. Why shouldn't people talk to one 
another in a train ? Life is short and railroad journeys 



1 12 Explaining the Britishers 

are long. Not all Britishers act like icebergs, 
but I have come to the conclusion that 99 out of a 100 
try to. A celebrated English General and Colonial 
administrator told me the other day that he belongs 
to a London club in which he hasn't been spoken to 
for twenty-five years. He talked to a fellow-member 
once and the man nearly died of apoplexy. A famous 
Irishman named Daniel O'Connell said that the 
average Englishman has all the qualities of a poker 
except its occasional warmth. 

He was right. The average Englishman trie*s to 
keep himself as stiff as a poker. He hates unbending. 
He was taught at school that it was not * ' good form 
to appear to be emotional. I have a Yank kid of my 
own at a typical English boarding-school for boys of 
from 9 to 14 years of age. I can see in him, from 
term to term, the exact effect of the British system of 
suppressing emotions. When parents visit their boys 
at an English boarding-school, the boys object to 
being kissed or embraced in sight of their comrades. 
They are taught that such exhibitions of natural 
effusiveness are ' ' unmanly ' ' and more fit for little 
girls than for English lads who are growing into young 
gentlemen. The boys don't object to being made a 
fuss of when they're alone with their parents, but 
they don't want any of the sob-stuff in public. 

Thus from his tenderest years the Britisher is 
brought up to look upon "reserve" and "poise" as 
the finest of human qualities. The effect of this 
system is to make the average Britisher shy. When 
my kid started in at Eastbourne he was a typical 




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The Real Britisher 113 

young American holy terror. Three years of Hold- 
Yourself-In training have almost turned him from 
an untamed cub into a sucking-dove. He is 
frightfully shy. He faces strangers almost in em- 
barrassment. He never rushes up and at them as 
if he were really glad to see them. He is polite all 
right, but always "reserved." He's been taught to 
be reserved. It's the English way. 

If you will remember this, you will be on the 
right road to understanding the British temperament. 
The Britisher's apparent coldness, which Americans 
so often mistake for rudeness, is nothing in the world 
but inborn and inculcated shyness. By that I mean 
that he has not only inherited " reserve " from his 
father before him, but in order that he should grow 
up to be the right kind of a Britisher he has "reserve " 
taught to him when he goes to school. He learns 
there that he must never wear his heart on his sleeve. 

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. How 
has the system on which Young Britain is raised 
turned out in practice? Well, I think the answer to 
that can be found in this book. Britain has made 
good. Her system of rearing her manhood has made 
good. I have been talking about the " reserve " and 
"poise" of British boys. The same thing applies to 
British girls. They have made good in this war, too. 
The very lads, the very girls, who were brought up 
on the non-emotional scheme of education — the 
" Public School " youths of both sexes, the boys from 
Eton, Harrow and Winchester, the girls from Chelten- 
ham, Roedean and Wycombe — are the ones who have 

5 



114 Explaining the Britishers 

"carried on*' in the field and at home. The British 
Army to-day is officered to a large extent by " men " 
who were boys in 1914, attending either the " public 
schools " (what we call " prep.** schools) or the 
universities. Oxford and Cambridge, the Yale and 
Harvard of England, have been practically deserted 
for four years. Their famous old halls and dormi- 
tories are Officers' Training Corps headquarters now, 
and have been ever since the war began. Hundreds 
of fellows who went out from them as undergraduates 
have meantime won glory as competent, gallant 
officers. Hundreds of them, too, as you will see if 
you ever visit Oxford or Cambridge and look at the 
Rolls of Honor on the doors of the college chapels, 
have already laid down their young lives in Liberty's 
cause. These were the boys who were brought up 
to be shy and reserved and always to keep their 
poise — who didn't like to be babied by their fathers 
and mothers when other kids were looking, who were 
trained not to be effusive when introduced to 
strangers, who grew up trying to look and act as much 
like icebergs as their fathers did. Yet in the Great 
Test they were not found wanting. Nor were 
the girls who in 1914 were at boarding-school, 
"flappers," as their sort is called, because they 
wear their hair ' * flapping ' ' up and down their 
backs. These girls, many of whom four years 
ago lived only for chocolate creams and sweet- 
hearts and novels, are "W.A.A.C.s '* (Women's Army 
Auxiliary Corps) or " V.A.D.s " (Voluntary Aid 
Detachment) to-day, or land girls, or chauffeurs, or 



The Real Britisher 1 1 5 



hard at work in one of the other countless war occupa- 
tions in which the supposedly weaker sex is distin- 
guishing itself in all belligerent countries. These 
young Britishers — boys and girls — are the backbone 
of their country in this critical hour. You see, it 
didn't harm them at all to be brought up differently 
than we are. They have turned out to be real men 
and women just the same. 

Americans who are in England for the first time 
find everything old-fashioned — the dinky railway 
trains, the low, grey old buildings in the big cities, 
the snail-like elevators, the people's love for doing 
things in the way their grandfathers did them and 
because their grandfathers did them. We don't find 
enough hustle in the air. The Britishers don't seem 
to know how to get a move on. Now, the fact is 
that there is nearly as much hustle to the square inch 
in these islands as there is in the United States, only 
the Britisher hustles without making such a fuss 
about it. His railway trains do look dinky alongside 
of ours, but you will probably be surprised to know 
that some of the fastest passenger trains in the world 
(in ordinary times) are the expresses which cover 
the long-distance stretches in this country, like the 
London-Plymouth line, a run of something like 250 
miles which before the war used to be done without 
a stop. The Britisher loves old things — buildings, 
customs, habits, traditions, precedents. I heard a 
man say once that an Englishman would only adopt 
a new idea en condition that it didn't loo\ new. Being 
only 142 years old as a nation, we're too young to 



M6 Explaining the Britishers 

have learned veneration for the antique. When we 
have 1,000 years and more of national history back 
of us, we'll not want to pull down beautiful old 
churches that, to the average Yank's way of thinking, 
obstruct traffic — such as a couple you'll see in London 
squatting squarely in the middle of the busy Strand. 
We'll love them, as the Britisher loves them, because 
they are old. At present we're in the sky-scraper 
phase of our existence, in the age when newness, 
bigness, quickness, seem to us the important things 
of life. We will outgrow that phase. 

An Englishman's home is his castle — that's one 
of the most famous of British sayings. To know the 
real Britisher he has to be seen in his home. The 
homes of Britain are thrown wide open to the 
American soldier and sailor, and I hope each and 
every one of you may have the opportunity of 
enjoying British private hospitality. You will find 
it to be the real thing. There will be no ice- 
bergs or ' ' reserve ' ' within the four walls in which 
you will be asked to make yourself perfectly at 
home. It will not make any difference whether 
the home you're invited to is a workman's cottage 
in the Midlands or a Ducal establishment in 
another part of the country. The Britisher leaves all 
"side" outside when he takes you inside. You 
will discover very promptly that his ' ' poise ' ' is 
really not poise at all, but pose. He turns out 
to be . a human being — probably to your surprise, 
certainly to your pleasure and complete satisfaction. 
On one or two occasions I have been the guest of a 



The Real Britisher 1 1 7 

real, live English Duke — one of the noblest in the 
realm. He was as Dukish as I expected him to be — 
till we reached his home, which was a real castle. 
Then he suddenly transformed himself into a full- 
blooded man and into one of Nature' s gentlemen. 
He grabbed my suit-case out of my hand, as soon as 
we had crossed the threshold, and personally escorted 
me to my bedroom. Half an hour later he knocked 
at the door (it was late at night) and inquired : "Any- 
thing you want before you go to sleep ? " I was up 
against the Britisher as he really is. 

It used to be the fashion in our country to twist 
the British Lion's tail. Every politician after votes, 
or every Fourth of July orator who wanted to make 
a hit, roasted the British. Those days, I hope, are 
gone for ever. It will be for you and for me, who 
have made the acquaintance of the real Britain, to 
see that they never return. I firmly believe that the 
keeping of the world's peace, when this war is over, 
will be mainly in the hands of the English-speaking 
peoples. We shall not need to enter into a formal 
"alliance" with the British Empire. The alliance 
that has been sealed by the shedding of British and 
American blood on common battlefields is signed in 
ink that will outlast all the written alliances that could 
ever be put on paper. 

And if I may indulge in one parting thought 
before I finish a work that has been for me a 
labor of love, I would ask you to banish from 
your thoughts the notion that America came into the 
war to "save England/' England h as saved herself, 



1 1 8 Explaining the Britishers 

France has saved herself. We are in the war to save 
ourselves. We got into it because self-preservation 
is the first law of Nature. We are at war with 
Germany for precisely the same reasons that Britain, 
France and Italy are at war with her — because her 
victory would demolish the very foundations on which 
American life rests. We are at war to make the 
world safe for Democracy — for our own Democracy 
as well as for the Democracy of other nations 
alongside whose scarred and veteran legions it is our 
high privilege to fight. 



The End. 



Printed in Great Britain by A. J. Wilson & Co., Ltd., 
154, Clerkenwell Road, E,C. 1. 



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